Rating: 
Summary: A Little Book on Robert Bly's Shadow
Review: This book, in which Mr. Bly argues against the dark side of modern North American culture, is little more than a series of projections of the author and his colleagues' shadows onto the larger culture. Fortunately for Mr. Bly, the larger culture provides a sizable hook for these projections, so that he accomplishes the remarkable feat of lying and telling the truth at the same time.Mr. Bly complains that television bombards the viewer with "an avalanche of specialized information that stuns the brain." This is ironic, considering the context. After all, Mr. Bly and his co-conspirators are a group of maenads with machine guns who delight in spraying their readers with a barrage of mana-charged names for the sole purpose of spellbinding the weakminded. That Mr. Bly is able to mention Yeats, Mohammad, Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Augustine, Plato, Plotinus, Dante, Ibn Arabi, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret of Navarre all in half of one page (209) may impress some; to my mind, it's all just a hailstorm of cultural fingernail-clippings. This, friends, is what the dark side of the Force looks like in our world in this age of the poet-assassins. Thus, Mr. Bly is projecting his own rapid-fire mythopsychosocioreligiopoetics onto the broadcasters. They produce junk culture; he produces junk mythography. He complains that we should pay greater homage to our cultural ancestors. As someone who reads his Homer, Ovid, Dostoevsky, and Proust in the original, I agree. However, this doesn't change the basic fact that Mr. Bly is a charlatan parading as a modern Charlemagne, an impostor who would have you believe him the heir to King Alfred's cause. Be wary: it can be all too easy to mistake Saruman the Proud for Gandalf the Wise, since the two look very similar to the untrained eye. And in comparing him to a mighty sorcerer, I am not just fighting metaphor with metaphor, for Mr. Bly is a sorcerer in the most literal sense of the word, and a very powerful one at that. As a poet-assassin, he is extremely well-versed in the incantatory arts. Even such heady statements as, 'the work by Bowlby, Winnicott, and Kohut supports the idea that children are basically "warmth-seeking mammals"', are attempts to ensnare the uninitiated with words. Mr. Bly complains ("Compleynt, compleynt I hearde upon a day...") that 'some art and poetry imitate television of that sort now, showing objects over and over but no new images. The mood is flat, passive, and depressed.' Again, this is a projection of Mr. Bly's shadow, this time onto the artists and poets. This statement comes from the pen of the leading writer of a genre of books that reproduces the same mythographic hors d'oeuvres over and over again ad nauseam. There are only so many times that you can recycle the description of Cuchulain's battle-frenzy before you realize that Mr. Bly and his colleagues are simply producing and reproducing thinly-disguised reruns of The Hero With A Thousand Faces. This is Gilligan's Island for the Jungian mass-man. The Sibling Society is a book written by a sibling for siblings. If you want some heartier fare, here's a few mana-charged names: Evelyn Underhill, Jane Harrison, W.F. Otto, and Thomas Merton. These authors write for grown-ups who sincerely revere the imperative of Apollo. All in all, this book makes me think that Mr. Bly has spent rather too much time in the sun. Consequently, he has, in his sunburnt state, managed to write the single greatest encomium to hypocrisy yet produced by the human psyche. Have I been understood? - Dionysus to the You-Know-Whos.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought Provoking
Review: Those familiar with "Iron John" know Bly's style, and how he uses fairy tales to illuminate the hidden recesses of modern culture. In "The Sibling Society," he pulls off an amazing feat. Using simple tales such as "Jack and the Beanstalk" and the Hindu myth of Siva/Ganesha, Bly points out many of the failings evident in modern culture. His insights are measured, wise and seem quite accurate to me. Time and time again, I found myself paging through the book, nodding "Yes! That's it." It seemed as if I were seeing the plight of Gen-Xers like myself clearly for the first time. Unlike most of my generation, I was raised in a traditional two-parent household. My mother was strong, gentle and patient, my father an old-fashioned, firm but fair disciplinarian. Needless to say, I was shocked when I went away to college. Though I drank, the debaucheries most people went through seemed silly and shallow. Even in corporate America, I find 'brown-nosing' and petty backroom politics, instead of solid analysis and ethical behavior, to be the focus of most people's careers. Not that I am always perfect, but at least I try. I think Bly has done a wonderful job illuminating the nature of the dilemma I've been facing for years. Though some of his points are arguable, I think the synthesis is a pretty accurate Freudian/ Jungian relating of mythic elements of our psyches to the realities of modern life. His pointing out how the "super-ego" has shifted its emphasis from moral/ethical domination to a success/ popularity one seems to me quite apt. I can see it operating all around me. I was raised under the "old" system, and to this day find the "new" system quite alien. As an answer to the critic below, perhaps you are transferring your "shadow" onto the author. If anything, he is trying to awaken us from cultural trance we find ourselves in. His aim is not, heavy intellectualism, but communicating the essence of mythic/poetic dream images to normal men and women. That is much more useful than turning out a tome that a few solitary scholars will ever read. I think few authors manage to say so much so simply as Bly manages to.
Rating:
Summary: Bly's On Fire!
Review: You want to know what Britney Spears, Columbine, and Gary Condit have in common? Just read this book and you'll get your answer as well some great insights into our twisted little culture at the present. Yeah, yeah, yeah, online detractors, I heard it all before-he's stolen material from such classics as "The Culture of Narcisissm" and other works. He's unfocused, pompous,etc. Call him what you will, but I think it's brilliant how he uses myths and fairy tales to lead us into our modern day predicaments that we all sense on some vague level but can't articulate them clearly. And in the end, he is right on target with his arguments. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't whisper "sibling society" under my breath-whether it's that I see a 45 year old mother of 4 with a picture of a supermodel taped to her fridge to stop her from eating or the myriad of "reality programming" shows on every major network. Bly is a cultural prophet with a very thought provoking set-up that stays with you long after you finish the book.
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