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Tim Guest (1975–2009)

Författare till My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru

5+ verk 447 medlemmar 14 recensioner 1 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Inkluderar namnet: T. Guest

Verk av Tim Guest

Associerade verk

Granta 80: The Group (2002) — Bidragsgivare — 146 exemplar

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Allmänna fakta

Vedertaget namn
Guest, Tim
Födelsedag
1975-07-17
Avled
2009-07-31
Kön
male
Nationalitet
UK

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Recensioner

really rather excellent book, told with humour and a little sorrow, about the life of a young boy, growing up in the shadow of an unseen guru
 
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nordie | 7 andra recensioner | Oct 14, 2023 |
Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, May 2 - June 14, 1981. Traveled to National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, October 1 - November 1, 1981 ; Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, November 10 - December 13, 1981 ; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal, January 8 - February 28, 1982 ; Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, March 11 - April 18, 1982 ; Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver, October 4 - October 30, 1982. Texts by Tim Guest and Germano Celant. Cover by Michael Snow.… (mer)
 
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petervanbeveren | Aug 16, 2023 |
Tim Guest's "My Life in Orange" isn't a definitive account of the Rajneeshi cult currently selling itself as "Osho." Yes, over the course of the book, the author mentions organization's deficiencies and sins -- its founder's boundless avarice, the cult's various financial and sexual crimes, its spirit-breaking disciplinary methods -- but this isn't a work of investigative journalism. "My Life in Orange" is a personal account of what it's like to grow up in an environment in which the things that most first-world middle-class kids take for granted -- parental supervision, schedules, schooling, personal space, and interpersonal limits -- were almost completely absent. Some readers, I'm sure, much of this book a little unreflective, but it's written -- and written well -- from a child's perspective. In the Bagwhan's communes, adults engaged in marathon personality-reducing pseudo-therapeudic sessions that often ended with screams, fights, and broken bones while the kids, being more or less left to themselves, ran wild. Admitted that he was spared most of the worst of commune life, the author seems to paint a surprisingly warm picture of his own experience growing up Sannyasin. He remembers the children he lived with fondly and recounts the various adventures they shared while their parents went, unaccompanied, on their own spiritual journeys. On his own since earliest childhood, the author and his friends learned to take care of themselves, of each other, and to game the system that was, in some respects, stiflingly rule-bound and, in others, bewilderingly chaotic. We see them play hooky, shoplift, sham, wander, and try to carve out a little private space in a place where that concept has more-or-less been abolished. Emotionally neglected by his mother but surrounded by kids with whom he forges emotional bonds stronger than some people feel for their blood relatives, we see the author try to hold on to some sense of self as his life takes one vertiginous turn after another. He performs a delicate balancing act here: providing straightforward descriptions of his situations and owning up to the sadness he felt while never pleading for the reader's pity. Although he feels the loss of his mother's affections keenly, you get the sense that the author didn't quite realize how different his life really was from other peoples'. Guest's tone is, as befits a child, I suppose, innocent throughout.

"My Life in Orange" is also something of a portrait of an age. Guest intuits -- correctly, I think -- that his mother, the product of a poor, miserable, and stiflingly strict Catholic upbringing, joined the Rajneeshis in the mid-seventies because they promised a happy, hedonistic existence that was completely different from anything that she had ever known. The sheer incomprehensibility of Osho doctrine is sometimes difficult to believe: Rajneesh seems to have borrowed liberally from Buddhism, Hinduism, Western Occultism, even the Tarot. His spiritual teachings come off as a bewildering mix of facile profundity, dismissive humor, shameless pleasure-seeking, and naked avarice. He owned dozens of Rolls-Royces and a private jet. He sometimes seems like a living embodiment of the worst aspects of the sixties. As the eighties wore on, things got noticeably more paranoid. Sannyasin rules became more restrictive and the cult became more heavily armed. The author's mother fell from grace with the organization's leadership and was banished to a menial position in a faraway commune. Distinctly modern fears -- that of the looming threats of nuclear annihilation and AIDS -- began to dominate the cult's discourse. The author's account, a bit removed from these heavy realities, describes what it was like to experience seventies and eighties pop culture through a singularly cracked lens: commune kids danced to Michael Jackson and seventies soul hits, reenacted scenes from E.T., and watched a lot of pirated VHS tapes. Inside the cult, these bits of mass culture might as well have been beamed in from another planet. The wild misreadings of their contemporary world is fascinating to hear about, especially now, when we seem to be experiencing a particularly paranoid and fearful historical moment. While I can't testify to this book's accuracy, the author provides a surprising amount of detail here, along with a few historical documents. While it's difficult to know how much Guest has inadvertently filled in the missing bits of his own memories, it is also possible that he was simply born with a reporter's eye for detail. At the time that "My Life in Orange" was published, he was writing for some major British newspapers. He can certainly tell a story: many of the incidents recounted here are both vivid and well-told and, despite the intervening years, retain their emotional power.

"My Life in Orange" is also an account of the psychic damage that life as a Sannyasin inflicted on the author and, finally, a story about healing. The author argues that the lack of stability and sustained care that he experienced during childhood kept him from valuing himself as an individual, but, like many former cult members, he's insightful enough to mourn the loss of the sense of community that life in a commune -- even one as badly run as the Bhagwan's -- often engenders. He seems to admit that commune life filled a need for connection that many people living in the modern West feel. After a few rocky years, he even seems to have rebuilt his relationship with his mother and step-father, an extraordinarily generous act of forgiveness that I'm not sure I'd be capable of. He's done well and, while he hints that other commune kids he used to know have had a rougher go of it, the story that "My Life in Orange" tells is a fundamentally hopeful one. Recommended to those readers who enjoy stories of unusual childhoods and relish hearing about the weirder details of far-out social movements.
… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
TheAmpersand | 7 andra recensioner | Sep 21, 2020 |
In this book, Tim Guest writes about his experiences in virtual worlds like Second Life, his interviews with people who take part in virtual worlds, the different ways virtual worlds get used, and more. It's not a systematic exploration of topics pertaining to virtual worlds, but it's often interesting. My favorite parts of this book were Guest's interviews and anything that discussed some of the creative ways virtual worlds have been used.

Guest spoke with people at Linden Labs (the creators of Second Life), a Korean man who is the king of kings in Lineage II, a few people who managed to make money in virtual worlds in ways that would be clearly illegal if they were done in the real world (replicating virtual gold, for example) but aren't always so clearly illegal when done in virtual worlds, the man behind a virtual mafia don, and more. Many of these people were fascinating, and I found myself wishing that Guest would talk less about himself and more about these other people.

Although I realize that Guest's discussions about his own background were outnumbered by his discussions about everything else, it got to the point where I was a little annoyed about reading, yet again, about Guest's perpetual money problems, his bad luck, his girlfriend, and his mother (who was apparently in a cult, had a guru, and whose interests meant that her son grew up in a commune). Guest's own life and experiences color how he views virtual worlds - I thought it was particularly interesting how his experiences in the commune led him to see Linden Labs as something like a cult - but I picked this book up to read about virtual worlds, not about Guest, and I sometimes felt that Guest was getting a little repetitious when bringing himself up.

In addition to Guest's interviews, I also enjoyed reading about the various ways people have used virtual worlds. There are many people who might hear about virtual worlds like Second Life, EverQuest, and others and believe them to be just about entertainment, but they often get used and created for other reasons. People find love, make lasting friendships, and have experiences that they couldn't possibly have in the real world (the best example of this is Wilde Cunningham, a Second Life resident played by a group of nine men and women with cerebral palsy).

Real world reporters have given a lot of attention to those who manage to make a living in virtual worlds, and Guest discusses that as well, mentioning Anshe Chung (an incredibly wealthy avatar in Second Life, one of the many games where virtual currency can be turned into real world currency and back again) and others. However, he tries to balance his discussion by saying that very few residents of Second Life (and, presumably, other virtual worlds) actually make enough money to live off of in the real world. Later on in the book, Guest writes about virtual worlds that have been created for training purposes, such as virtual worlds used by the military to train people in tactics and strategy or to train people to more effectively evaluate situations (if players mess up in a virtual world, no one dies and they can try again until they get better, whereas similar mistakes in the real world are less forgiving).

In addition to some of the more positive ways virtual worlds get used by their players, Guest also writes about other ways players use these worlds. There are griefers, people who play these games simply to harass and aggravate other players - these players may view their style of playing as entertainment, but the targets of griefing often do not agree with them. There are virtual mafiosi - the activities of these people depend upon the game being played, but in Second Life, for example, they might be hired to make certain players violate the game's terms of service, thereby getting their accounts suspended. There's also the virtual sex trade - at one point, to get an idea of one aspect of Second Life's sex trade, Guest uses a Second Life avatar to hire a virtual hooker.

I started reading this book shortly after finishing The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse by Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace, and I couldn't help but compare the two. Although I occasionally felt that Ludlow and Wallace's writing was a little confusing, I enjoyed their book more than I did Guest's. Like Guest, Ludlow sometimes wrote about himself, and he often wrote about his personal experiences in virtual worlds, but when Ludlow did this it was rarely repetitive and usually added something to the reader's knowledge of virtual worlds. Also, when Guest begins his book, he is in awe of virtual worlds, and this awe never goes away - he loves writing, again and again, about how someone in Second Life can pull a building out of his or her pocket, or fly, or jump off tall buildings for entertainment. This may sound like a good thing, but, as with Guest's writings about himself, it can get a little repetitive. It also makes Guest seem like a perpetual outsider when it comes to virtual worlds, despite the home he decided to purchase inside one. Ludlow, on the other hand, manages to be both an insider and an outsider, trying to stay objective as he investigates his stories, but investigating them as though the virtual world were any other place.

I imagine that some readers will prefer one style of writing over another, and, for me, Ludlow and Wallace's book was a better read. Both books cover many of the same topics and involve interviews with some of the same type of people (Linden Labs people, griefers, people involved in the virtual sex trade, etc.), but often one book covers certain topics better than the other.

Overall, Guest's book was nice, with some very interesting moments (I loved the interviews with Wilde Cunningham and Kyu Nam Choi, Lineage II's king of kings).

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)
… (mer)
 
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Familiar_Diversions | 4 andra recensioner | Sep 24, 2013 |

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Statistik

Verk
5
Även av
1
Medlemmar
447
Popularitet
#54,865
Betyg
½ 3.5
Recensioner
14
ISBN
19
Språk
3
Favoritmärkt
1

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