Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
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Best books read in 2008.
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Harry Potter;
also
Harry Potter en Español.
New books on Christianity and Spirituality
by Pagels, Ehrman, et al. |
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Why read a book?.
The Mental Health of George W. Bush
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Skip pages
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{ September : septiembre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2008 }
(9.30.2008)
| Day 2 of
Ancient Greek Course.
An Introduction to Ancient Greek:
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(9.28.2008)
See it particularly for
| The trouble is that the reader, like the general public to which he belongs, and in spite of all the evidence telling him that he shouldn't, wants to believe in his spies: which, come to think of it, is how we went to war in Iraq. |
| Day 1 of
Ancient Greek Course.
An Introduction to Ancient Greek:
Book blurb:
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This collection was editd by David Grayson for the 2008 Two Autumns reading of HPNC.
The Best American Poetry 2008.
In Two Minds (2008), responsive
tanka
by Amelia Fielden and Kathy Kituai.
An experimental novel that I struggled with for 200 pages (a quarter of this 838-page tome and tomb), till I just wanted it out of my house.
Every character is eccentric (with one or more obsessions or phobias) and its own personal percussion section ushering it through the world; the cacophony is annoying. It feels like Baker is having a lot of private fun in there. But out here it looks like graphomania.
Save yourself some grief: read the Guardian review by Patrick Ness at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview3: it turns the plot into something resembling sense: a much better option than reading the whole book. That review includes: "Barker, as ever, is far more interested in the flexibility of language than in simple, straightforward definitions". And tips its hat at such as I: "Darkmans is just the sort of bravura performance that will probably inspire vitriol in a certain breed of reviewer as too ostentatious, too brazen. Pity them, reader, for being unable to embrace such a loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. Barker is a great, restless novelist, and Darkmans is a great, restless novel."
Sure, I admire some interesting textual experiments: e.g., one man's eloquent spoken Turkish is presented in a bold and baroque font, yet in English, showing the English-speakers' ignorance of the richness of non-English speech. Cute.
And Barker has fun with names: the man passing for the protagonist is called Beede, who is not the first English historian, 8th-century Venerable Beede, but a modern one; an exgirl-friend of his son is Kelly Broad; a forger is Peta Borough (Peterborough, geddit); a 5-year-old prodigy is called Fleet.
The Amazon-cited review from Publishers Weekly comments that one character is a "young ... spooky prodigy who, in one of this intricate tale's several instances of mind-bending nuttiness, may actually be Isidore's [his father's] ancestor from nine generations ago. This improbable premise is supported by the boy's propensity for quoting bits of the biography of King Edward IV's court jester, one John Scogin, the dark man who haunts the book" and who [it turns out] is the same John Scogin as Beede is researching.
None of which helps me turn another page. Even though Salon's Laura Miller calls it "a major novel, a savory hybrid of Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace (with a dash of Stephen King)".
In the NYT Sylvia Brownrigg's review implies that Barker needs champions: "Her [Barker's] champions in Britain include Romesh Gunesekera (who nonetheless described reading Darkmans as 'a bit like watching half a cricket match with no scoreboard') and Ali Smith, whose allusive, angled fictions have something in common with Barker's."
| The amazing
The History of Kelsick Grammar School, Ambleside by John Mander A unique record of a great school in the English Lake District;
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(9.19.2008)
By contrast, Heaney's After Horace (a response to the Twin Towers destruction on 11th September) connects the political edge of Horace's style to modern readers in a way that Bennett's relatively literal and prosey translations do not.
Carolyn Kizer's version of Horace's Ode II.12 Spare me the Roman wars is a much more delightful and insightful version than Bennett's; she shows the humor that Horace's readers might have appreciated.
What It Is by Lynda Barry.
(9.16.2008)
(9.15.2008)Favorite moments include:
And grouchy David Denby (The New Yorker, Sept 15, 2008, pp. 96-97) is surely completely wrong -- the Coen Brothers love many of their characters and especially the three main women:
Abandoned various books due back at the library:
"Practical suggestions for changing your relationship to depression" include [p.63]:
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| Being depressed and unhappy sometimes is just part of life. It doesn't mean that something has gone wrong with life any more than rain is something that has gone wrong with the weather or night is something that has gone wrong with the day. |
See also her:
A fast and glittery ride through the matrix that is 'cyberspace'. Ah, those flashy 80's. Cyberpunk cowboys and language invention.
An apocalyptic story, as scary as it ever was, listening under the blankets decades ago.
{ August : agosto (see also books on learning Spanish) 2008 }
(8.31.2008)
(8.30.2008)Some favorite quotations from Itamar Moses' Bach at Leipzig.
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Bach at Leipzig .
Opposite:
Copyright © 2008 by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. | See SSC Bach at Leipzig |
Read by Johnny Heller.
See also Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Through Jokes. by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.
Good to get the original story after reading J.M. Coetze's Foe.
| Check out the sleeper of the SSC season:
William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well . Opposite:
Copyright © 2008 by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. | See SSC All's Well That Ends Well |
Tim Ocel directs this super production of William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well.
As a dark comedy, it plunges deeply into relationships and into the confrontation of those behaving in a damaging, disloyal, and dishonest way.
The picture above shows Paroles, the braggart, betraying (he believes) to a rival army his fellow soldiers and friends. He is about to be confronted by those he betrayed, particularly Bertram, the young man who has betrayed his marriage. This, in retrospect, is the start of Bertram coming to his senses, and helps him accept and (dare we say) rejoice in his wife.
Four good female roles (Helena, Diana, Diana's widowed Mum, and Helena's mother-in-law, the only one not in the photo below) were well-acted in this production, and exemplify the best of morality, tenacity, and creativity:
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William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well .
Opposite:
Copyright © 2008 by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. | See SSC All's Well That Ends Well |
This production is an excellent companion to SSC's Romeo and Juliet. In both, there is a marriage between people of two families where intermarriage would not be expected. There, however, the parents disapprove of the wedding. But here, the parents and surrogate parents approve of the wedding, and the bridegroom resists it -- hence this play with its exploration of loyalty and commitment. (8.22.2008)
Others by Mary Oliver reported recently:
A fascinating meditation on empire, the children of empire, and the view from the outside.
This is a more interesting experiment in literature, and a more original commentary on the state of the world, than (in particular) The Gathering (by Anne Enright), its competitor for and the actual winner of the 2007 Booker Prize.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is told by a man who has experienced great education in the hands of the world. While he is playfully suspicious of the man whom he addresses, it remains unclear at the story's end why the man addressed remains with the narrator: perhaps he has a mission to assassinate the narrator? perhaps he knows that he is to be assassinated? all we can say is that something is about to go down, with the most explicit hint coming with an overly sweet dessert [p. 138]:
| After all, one reads that the soldiers of your country are sent to battle with chocolate in their rations, so the prospect of sugaring your tongue before undertaking even the bloodiest of tasks cannot be entirely alien to you. |
The narrator's attitude is clear fairly early on: he would like to be part of a moneyed nation of "deciders" yet from the start he is in conflict with its citizen's values [p. 21]:
| there were details which annoyed me. The ease with which they parted with money ... Or their self-righteousness in dealing with those whom they had paid for a service ... [and] insisting things be done their way ... upstarts ... devoid of refinement ... conduct[ed] themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class. |
Someone with the narrator's experience would see the following description (of Pakistan from the father of the North American girl that is unable to have the relationship with the narrator that he desires), as appropriate for the U.S.A.:
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"Economy's falling apart, no?
Corrupt, dictatorship, the rich living like princes while everyone else suffers.
... the elite has raped that place well and good, right?
And fundamentalism.
You guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism."
... his tone -- with, if you will forgive me, its typically American undercurrent of condescension -- struck a negative chord with me. |
At the turning point of the story, which was bound to happen, given the above, comes:
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I stared as one -- then the other -- of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed.
And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.
... my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack ... no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone so visibly had brought America to her knees. Ah, I see I am only compounding your displeasure. I understand, of course; it is hateful to hear another person gloat over one's country's misfortunes. But surely you cannot be innocent of such feelings yourselves. Do you feel no joy at the video clips -- so prevalent these days -- of American munitions laying waste the structures of your enemies? |
Ultimately, one wonders how reliable is this narrator, how much of what he says is what he believes happened to him, and how much is simply a tale of invention to delay, in Scheherezada-like style, a death. So much of the story could be invention (or even delusion), yet so most of the people (apart from Erica) and places seem real.
An eructation, a tattered dress, a cacophony of memories, reconstructed and imagined, and of complaints and blame on the mother and the maternal grandmother, on the dead brother, on various other relatives and family acquaintances. Interesting but not a clear Booker Prize winner.
| Happiness in a man does not do it for me. |
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William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet .
Opposite:
Copyright © 2008 by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. | See SSC Romeo and Juliet |
Kim Rubinstein directs this magnificent production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
The first delight is this production's physicality, for the play opens not with words but with the cacophony of an outdoor market place, the fruit- and dagger-wielding women, the rough-housing young men, the knife juggler, the sword-fighting gangs, and the Prince (the commanding Gene Gillette also seen in Burn This) forcing the gang fight to a crashing halt.
This energy continues in the rough-tumble interaction among Romeo and his comrades, the marvelous conceit of their donning fluffy wings of Eros (Mercutio's tinged with blood-pink edges), and their take-over of the formal dance at Capulet's house.
As for the plot, yes, it's supposedly well-known. Yes, it's a tragedy of blood vendetta and banishment; of forbidden love and midnight marriage; of death by sword, dagger, and poison; of servants and a priest whose loyalties are not reliable to those they serve.
But this production is the first to make clear the tragedy of the marriage between the inconstant Romeo with the ditsy [see ditsy footnote] Juliet:
And what of other highlights? Best are:
| "However I would not call Juliet ditsy. She is 13, even a wise 13, but still only 13. Fresh, open to the world's delights, her eagerness not yet tainted by cynicism; but naive, not able to tell the difference between playing house with her girlfriends (or reading teen romances) and a real marriage to a man, with all the weight [no Shakespearean pun intended? j.z.] it carries." |
Satisfying loyalties at the end.
After seeing Shakespeare Santa Cruz's production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, I had to read it.
It is great on the page, though Anna comes across more strongly than in the production I saw. And yes, I do still find Burton self-centered and dislikable.
Pale has something useful to say about talkers (it being a rather talky play):
| There was this character runnin' off at the mouth. ... I gotta come to the conclusion that I'm weird. Cause I try to communicate with these jerkoffs in what is essentially the mother tongue, but no one is picking me up; they're not reading me. There's some mystery here. Okay, sometimes they're just on a rap. I respect rap. You're not supposed to be listening. You can read the paper, watch TV, eat pistachios. I'm not talking that. I'm talking these jerkoffs think you're listening. |
And Anna reads Pale:
| There is no doubt in my mind that you have completely mastered half the art of conversation. |
But later when Anna tells Pale that they can't get along because: "We're apples and oranges", Pale asks:
| Have you ever had that apple tart, glazed with marmalade? |
Some of the best lines are from Larry, such as, in response to Pale's "What the fuck do you fuckin' know? Fruit?":
| That's one of those questions one never knows whether to answer with hubris or humility. |
and near the end:
| This isn't opera, this is life, why should love always be tragic? |
Wow! Heard Itamar Moses (author of Bach at Leipzig ) at Capitola Bookcafé.
Some quotations from Moses:
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Itamar Moses' Bach at Leipzig .
Opposite:
Copyright © 2008 by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. | See SSC Bach at Leipzig |
Other books by Coetze read:
Michael is smart and inventive. In other times he would have been a successful gardener or farmer or mechanic. But his times are broken and in that context his survival is a miracle. The brief middle section, with a separate narrator, is instructive and focus-altering, with its calculated and miscalculated compassions.
Anatomy for Yoga with Paul Grilley.
This is the most useful DVD you will ever see on Yoga: it shows you how different our bodies are, and why some people MUST be allowed the freedom to adapt poses to avoid injury to the unadaptable bone-meets-bone part of the anatomy.
| See more on Anatomy for Yoga with Paul Grilley |
After seeing Shakespeare Santa Cruz's production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, I wanted to read on of Wilson's earlier plays and found his famous The Hot L Baltimore.
Both plays use the fashions of Realism, like real elapsed time, toleration of silence, people over-talking each other, etc. Although The Hot L Baltimore was once a bold new play, in just a few decades it has become nothing special. Burn This, however, is a much stronger and more resonant play. And will last longer.
{ July : julio (see also books on learning Spanish) 2008 }
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Lanford Wilson's contemporary and edgy love story
Burn This, director Michael Barakiva. "I love it when you get an idea.
| See SSC Burn This |
Burn This is the fiercest play in Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 2008 season. It is powerful and difficult, and it strongly resonates and reverberates days afterward.
This is an important play to see for its treatment of passion and love, loyalty and betrayal. But more especially it is important for its treatment of anger. All too often in drama, anger is simply an inflammatory tool that powers the plot. And anger is indeed one of the cylinders that Burn This runs on.
But more importantly, Burn This concerns the recognition, the acknowledgment, the acceptance, the living through, of anger. And the one person that does this, that can do this, that is the heart, the Heart, of the play, is Anna, the only woman in this four-character play.
In preview, the strongest of the four actors were
Yvonne Woods (Anna) was weaker, particularly in the first third, where the play has distressingly more narration rather than action; it will be important for her to enters the role more fully, so that she inhabits (instead of "acts") the central role of Anna. David Arrow (Burton) seemed comparatively weak and rather artificial; I don't think it's just that his character is unlikable, though I have a copy of the play script on order so I'll be very curious to see how the parts read on the page.
As with Bach at Leipzig, it's important not only to see Burn This, but to try to see it a second time, to appreciate more of its depth, complexity, and wisdom. (7.30.2008)
Environmental Ethics Course (summer intensive) is over. What was learned?
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Itamar Moses' Bach at Leipzig .
Opposite:
Copyright © 2008 by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. | See SSC Bach at Leipzig |
Having heard great things about this play and loving Bach, blogger Jean Vengua and I were delighted to see it tonight. The first half of SSC's Bach at Leipzig is witty and amusing. But after the intermission, the play opens into incandescence!
The story shows seven musicians competing in Leipzig for a prestigious job and intriguing in various combinations to defeat the others.
Both we and the audience around us laughed, chuckled, giggled, and guffawed for almost the entire play. The wit is in the words and in the body language of the actors, particularly the lithe and graceful Drew Foster (Steindorff), the nimble-fingered Allen Gilmore (Lenck), and "first voice" Stephen Caffrey (Fasch).
Don't be alarmed by reports that this play is written to echo the form of a musical fugue. You don't need to know anything about music to see and delight in this play. Moses does not presume that his audience has musical experience: he structured his play as a fugue, with each actor being one of the intertwining voices of a fugue. Some distance into the play, Moses has one of his actors (appropriately, the first one to speak) describe how a fugue is organized, with the actors pantomiming a recapitulation (as a fugue does) what has occurred already.
Particular delights include:
As Marco Barricelli says : "Itamar Moses will be one of the great forces of theatre in the next decade". (7.24.2008)
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Finished listening to the recording of:
Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) by J.K. Rowling.
Last year, read the hardback first edition of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
( blogged at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ).
Enjoyable to listen (eventually) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows read by Jim Dale. But he is quite weak compared with the brilliant Stephen Fry in British English -- get that recording if you can get a British friend to send it to you. |
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Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 27th season is officially from July 16 - August 31. Today's preview conversation gave a unique early view from executive artistic director Marco Barricelli and actors for:
| All's Well That Ends Well |
These preview conversations are insightful and illuminating introductions to each of the 2008 plays:
Index of 2008 season of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (7.20.2008)
Others by Mary Oliver reported recently:
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Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 27th season is officially from July 16 - August 31. Today's preview conversation gave a unique early view from executive artistic director Marco Barricelli and actors for:
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Bach at Leipzig (Noon at the Nick).
playwright Itamar Moses' clever story of seven musical rivals in 1722. Performing on the indoor Mainstage Theatre. |
This sounds like an exciting staging of a brilliant play. Marco Barricelli says "Itamar Moses will be one of the great forces of theatre in the next decade". Audience members who had seen one of the previews were enthusiastic about the great quality of the drama, the acting, the costumes and scenery, and the integration of music with action.
Highlights from the four actors who talked with us include:
These preview conversations are insightful and illuminating introductions to each of the 2008 plays:
Index of 2008 season of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (7.17.2008)
In Sick Puppy, Carl Hiaasen addressed the destruction of Florida's coastal ecology by avaricious, mean, Republican coast-line mega-property developers.
In Skinny dip, Hiaasen addresses the destruction of Florida's Everglades, where a marine biologist's wife discovers that he is altering water samples at the behest of an agro-business tycoon. So the biologist kills his wife.
The novel has a plot worthy of Shakespearean, with evil villains, redemption of one, and true love (at least for the moment) for eight of its characters.
See also his:
Basket Case.
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They didn't stone sinners for the same reason
they didn't commit suicide -- it was beneath them." Toni Morrison, Sula |
Morrison is arguably the most original and poetic prose writer in the U.S.A. at this time. Sula (a National Book Award nominee) is beautifully written: a stunning story of the struggle of African Americans in rural Ohio during the first half of the twentieth century.
The story shows the prejudices in that community, particularly against characters that they outcast: Shadrack for his craziness and his obsession with death; Sula for many sins but particularly that she, a black woman, sleeps with white men. Equally importantly, it shows how the outcasts serve to stabilize the mainstream community; Morrison shows strikingly how the critics of the outcast Sula are improved by their rejection of her, becoming more responsible parents, husbands, wives. And how those improvements are lost at her death. So while the community could justify making her a scapegoat, it was to their immense advantage to do so.
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Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 27th season is officially from July 16 - August 31. The preview talks give a unique early view of the vision of artistic director Marco Barricelli for the season and of the directors and actors he has brought in:
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Preview of Burn This
playwright Lanford Wilson's contemporary and edgy love story. Under New York-based director Michael Barakiva. Performing on the indoor Mainstage Theatre July 30 - August 31. |
This is going to be a great season, judging from the passion and clarity of SSC Artistic Director Marco Barricelli, some of whose comments were:
Highlights of comments by New York-based director Michael Barakiva (for Burn This):
Index of 2008 season of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (7.12.2008)
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Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 27th season is officially from July 16 - August 31. But actually it starts today, with the first of several preview talks:
| July 11: Preview of Romeo and Juliet (Noon at the Nick) |
These preview talks are insightful and illuminating introductions to each of the 2008 plays:
Today's preview talk the SSC production of Romeo and Juliet makes both the play and the upcoming season sound terrific -- full of creativity, energy, talent, and passion.
The new SSC Artistic Director, Marco Barricelli, seems very grounded and more open than his predecessor, the talented Paul Whitworth. Particularly Barricelli talked frankly about the challenges of putting together a season and his selection of four plays. He expressed his need that for his first season, his directors of the plays in the open-air forested Glen (Romeo and Juliet and All's Well That Ends Well) who had directed previously in that "unique" space.
Then, Romeo and two companions sat on the left of the stage, talking to us about their (in this production) central-European gypsy status and relationships. There will be a lot of gypsy music in the show!
And Juliet on the right of the stage talked about the aristocratic nature of her family and relationships.
They production is "in tech" now, having moved out of the rehearsal space into the Glen.
Check the Shakespeare Santa Cruz site for the schedule of the plays themselves and of additional preview talks:
Index of 2008 season of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (7.10.2008)
| Pure Chocolate
by Fran Bigelow. See also our chocolate page and our Chocolate Taste Tests: |
Includes my own haiku and my own tanka, one of which was an Editor's Choice and another of which won Second Place in the moonset Tanka Contest.
| 'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection
by Grant Naylor and others. Series 4 of Red Dwarf is second only to the brilliant Series 2 of Red Dwarf. |
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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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