Description - Obese White Gentleman by Terry Dobson
Based on the life of idiosyncratic aikido master Terry Dobson, this novel by his partner Riki Moss - incorporating Terry's insightful autobiographical stories - reads as a fictionalized memoir. It is the story of two souls meeting at a mutually calamitous turning point in midlife. Fatherless, pushed by his tyrannical mother to the edge of violence and self-mythologizing, the male protagonist turns to aikido to save his life. Twenty-five years later, physically and spiritually heartsick, he returns to the wreckage of his ancestral summer home on Lake Champlain feeling too tainted to train, too blocked to write and too dispirited to deal with his declining health; he seriously considers disappearing into the icy waters.Instead, he drives down a road in an ice storm and hits a cow in a cornfield where an artist is chasing after her dog...Told through two interwoven timelines, one following his life through Park Avenue and the Bowery, Vermont, Japan, and California (with many points in between), and the other following the seven years of his relationship with the artist in the here and now, we encounter an eccentric assortment of seekers and gurus (real and fictive), spiritual dogs, performance artists, psychic plumbers, New Age healers, suicidal parents, old lovers; Ronald Reagan, Robert Bly, Leonard Cohen, Ram Dass, Chogyam Trungpa; and the land itself, as compelling as any character.
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