Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
[Inspired in part by
Catarina.net's book blog.]
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Answering someone who
asked him what one of his poems meant:
"You want me to say it worse?" Robert Frost. |
{ June (junio (see also books on Spanish)) 2006 }
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(6.29.2006)
"The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Bush administration does not have the authority to try terrorism suspects by military tribunal.
... justices upheld the challenge by Osama Bin Laden's ex-driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, against his trial at Guantanamo Bay.
The court's ruling that the proceedings violated Geneva Conventions is seen as a major blow to the administration.
... Five of the nine justices of the US Supreme Court supported the ruling. Three voted against.
Chief Justice John Roberts did not vote because he had judged the case at an earlier stage before joining the Supreme Court.
... The ruling does not demand the release of prisoners held at Guantanamo but gives the administration an opportunity to come up with another way of trying those held.
The BBC's Nick Miles in Washington says the implications of the decision are profound, as the tribunals already in place will now be ended and 60 others planned will not go ahead.
Mr Hamdan ... claims POW status, but like all camp prisoners, he is denied this and is instead designated an 'unlawful combatant' by the Bush administration. "
Beautifully read on CD by Elizabeth Sastre with lots of accents and individual intonations for the multitude of characters. Pun after pun, and the best use of a deus ex machina in the book business. My favorite character is Miss Haversham (from David Copperfield), who puts even global dominators in their places.
The best Fforde/Thursday book so far, though other favorites are: Something Rotten and The Eyre Affair.
2005 Winner of the Man Booker Prizes.
Banville is unafraid of externally imposed restrictions on language. In particular he is exuberant and generous and inventive in his use of English, especially in his rich array of adjectives and adverbs. Your delight of the way he writes carries you into the book, where you learn how horrible are the protagonist and many of the people that formed him.
2001 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
These poems have been highly praised by respected and skilled poets. To me most poems in the first half of the book are hard to enter, perhaps because of their quasi-academic language, perhaps because I can't figure out their emotional stance. The second half of the book is much more accessible.
Almost as good as his more recent Lullaby. An interesting book about educational anarchy and multiple personality. The protagonist also writes dreadful haiku, his Zen and haiku expressing only a small part of his fury:
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"Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered
Zen
Master and nobody noticed.
Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little
HAIKU
things and FAX them around to everyone.
When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally
ZEN right in everyone's hostile little face.
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It's not just about fighting:
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"Somebody broke into the offices between the tenth and fifteenth floors of the Hein Tower,
and climbed out of the office windows, and painted the south side of the building with
a grinning five-story mask, and set fires so the window at the center of each huge eye blazed
huge and alive and inescapable over the city at dawn.
What did it mean? And who would do this? ... Was it the Mischief Committe or the Arson Committee? The giant face was probably their homework assignment from last week. ... Each committee meets on a different night: Arson meets on Monday. Assault on Tuesday. Mischief meets on Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday. Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out. Support groups. Sort of." |
What's it all for?
| "It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough of the Earth to recover." |
But ultimately, while it's a story of madness, it's about:
| "What will you wish you'd done before you died?" |
(6.14.2006)
(6.13.2006)
(6.12.2006)
(6.11.2006)
Practical Gods
(2002 Winner of
the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
by Carl Dennis.
Much more interesting poems than those of Claudia Emerson's Late Wife, 2006 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Yes, they are still prosy, as when I first read them in 2003, but this time around I like them better.
(6.8.2006)
| "In every investigation ... a point beyond which we don't really need any more information. We already know enough to solve the case by means of nothing but some decent thinking." |
Late Wife
(2006 Winner of
the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
by Claudia Emerson.
Given their grumpiness, I needed some astonishing vibrant language (like Plath) as counterbalance. But found none. Much of the work is prosy, perhaps due to the origin of many of the poems as prose. According to Associated Press: "For three years, Claudia Emerson took her handwritten letters reflecting on her failed marriage of 19 years and her blossoming relationship with her second husband and taped them to the walls of her home and office. The letters, which were never sent, ended up in her book of poetry, Late Wife."
Even in the last third of the book, written in sympathy with her boyfriend (following the demise of her marriage) for the death of his wife, there is too much of the poet.
Two poems that I do like are "The Practice Cage" and "Buying the Painted Turtle". Each describes the freeing of a trapped creature. Her ego is muted and her sympathy for another is, finally, generous.
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Big Cats (2005)
stories
by Holiday Reinhorn. |
Delighted that Poetry FINALLY had an all-poetry issue. Highly recommended. Favorite poems are by Kay Ryan, Clive James, Michael Chitwood, Adam Zagajewski, and Todd Boss.
I sent Poetry magazine this 'letter' - obviously indebted to William Carlos
Williams:
This Is Just to Say I have read the poems that were in the June Poetry in the space you are usually saving for essays Forgive me they were more vibrant than prose and much more delicious |
(6.2.2006)
{ May (mayo (see also books on Spanish)) 2006 }
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(5.31.2006)
Includes an 11-page essay ("A Consideration of Poetry") by Kay Ryan and poems by W.S. Merwin and Geoffrey Hill.
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Finished
Lullaby (2002) by Chuck Palahniuk, |
Listened to Lullaby (2002) by Chuck Palahniuk, read by Richard Poe, who is one of the best readers of fiction, such as East of Eden and several books by Delillo.
Interesting though creepy book on the power to kill. One of the few books I've read where I began to feel grossed out, until a scene tipped into full-on absurdist mode.
The core question that the book asks is: what would you do if you discovered an ancient 'culling' lullaby poem that, after being incanted to someone that you want to die, causes that person to die painlessly and without a mark -- SIDS for everyone, as it were. It seems that anyone can behave like a criminal.
The story jumps between the narrated past and the flash-back past and the 'now' of the narrator and his sweetie (he hopes) on a literal witch hunt. It mostly works except before I get into stride: the pre-chapter and first chapter nearly put me off the book, because they seemed so superficial. Going back to them afterward, however, it became clear how well (though superficially and teasingly) they anticipated the eventual plot.
Interesting subplot on anti-advertising. In the end I have as much sympathy with the witches on the run as with the witch hunters.
One of the best books read in 2006.
Hilariously innocent: a couple of oldsters test a young newspaper journalist to see it she has the wit and gumption to ask the next question and follow the reporter's trail. A sweet cozy tongue-in-cheek mystery, first printed in The Hard Case Crime series with a lurid cover that is completely opposed to the content in plot and language.
Also see On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King.
(5.19.2006)
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Finished
Criminal Investigation (7th Edition) by Wayne W. Bennett for a class on criminal behavior. See contents of Criminal Investigation. Also see notes on The Body in Question. |
Quite funny. Features a lethal battle poet:
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"You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?" "No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy. ... when a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode." |
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"US President George W. Bush's approval rating has tumbled to an all-time low of 29 per cent. The latest Harris Interactive Poll in the Wall Street Journal shows the President's approval rating dropping from 35 per cent to 29 per cent in the space of a month." |
Compare with the already low post-re-election rating of George W. Bush.
(5.10.2006)
(5.07.2006)
Drove to Yosemite, listening to a taped abridgment of:
(5.01.2006)
| "These dramatic monologues are 100 percent fiction and are merely characters created by the poet. Some of them project the names of 'real' public figures onto made-up characters in made-up circumstances. When the names of corporate, media, public, or political figures are used here, those names are meant only to denote figures, images, the stuff of imagination; they do not denote or pretend to [sic] private information about actual persons, living, dead, or otherwise." |
Poems [actually the new poems] in this collection said to be previously published in:
{ April (abril (see also books on Spanish)) 2006 }
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See also:
Instead of providing the original, so one can quibble with or improve upon the translation, Poetry follows with each poem by a "Translator's Note".
Charlotte Gray (1998)
by Sebastian Faulks.
I read it after seeing the film. The book gave a much more complex and astonishing story of loyalty and reconciliation than the movie showed. There was also a LOT about the suffering of the adults (including the old painter and father) and the children (especially the two little boys) in the Nazi death camps. Also, Charlotte's father (who we didn't see in the movie) turns out to be very important in the book. I can see why the movie made 'Hollywood' changes (like have the boys go on the train with the old man, and have Charlotte race to give them a letter as they left), but the book is more realistic and poignant. Very glad I read it.
(4.22.2006)
Good collection of haiku, interleaving 'Zen telegrams' of the natural world, like:
Winter rain -- the shape of a heron perched on a post |
with the wry senryu ('about human existence') type of poem:
Of course he says his finest poems are in the lost notebooks |
Finds the lost notebook discovers there wasn't much there |
The authors claim their poems mostly fall between the sensibility of haiku and senryu. William J. Higginson and Michael McClure give enthusiastic back-cover blurbs.
The Truth (2000)
by Terry Pratchett.
William de Worde
starts Ankh-Morpork's first newspaper.
Messers Tulip and Pin, Pratchett's funniest
psychopaths,
attempt to disgrace the Patrician
Vetinari.
To the disgust of
Captain Sam Vimes,
de Worde not only solves the Vetinari mystery before Vimes,
but also ensures that Vimes receives credit.
Could we be seeing a patrician-in-training?
More favorites from the many
reviewed books by Terry Pratchett:
(4.14.2006)
... you used ... class divisions and racial divisions for the sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of strongly defending the constitutional separation of church and state, you have encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take power in the US and mold our secular government to their own image, and get rich doing it. ... you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and balances that you inherited and that were meant to protect you."
"doesn't really talk to us.
When it's advantageous or required, he'll go through the motions of talking
to us, but that's all. What it 'means' is that he either has to do it, like
the State of the Union speech; or he wants something from us, like votes; or
he's tossing out a string of words calculated to endear him to some fraction
of the citizenry, like ... 'Constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage.'
He doesn't care what he's saying, and afterward he doesn't consider himself
bound by what he's said.
The implications are unpleasant. Someone who doesn't care that he's
lying to you, and doesn't care that you know it, doesn't respect you, and
doesn't consider you part of his social or political universe. Look at how
many reasons Bush has tendered for cutting taxes for the rich, or going to
war with Iraq. The only connection between those statements and his actions
is that he believed that saying those things would get him what he wants."
After (2006)
by Jane Hirshfield.
Read
Kay Ryan's
Strangely Marked Metal (1985).
See also his:
Skinny dip
and
Sick Puppy.
(4.5.2006)
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Listened to
Gilgamesh (a new English version)
translated by Stephen Mitchell. Brilliant. The world's oldest epic (from 1700 BCE) found on eleven clay tables in 1853 in the ruins of Nineveh. Tells of Gilgamesh, psychopath, two-thirds god, and king of Uruk (today the country is Iraq), his criminal behavior against his own people, his brotherhood with the wildman Enkidu, his preemptive attacks, and his journey to the underworld of death. One of the best books read in 2006. |
(4.3.2006)
(4.2.2006)
(4.1.2006)
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Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
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Copyright © 2006-2008 by J. Zimmerman. |
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