Links.
Booker Prizes
Chocolate.
Books read
Best books read in 2013.
Best writers of poetry and prose
My chocolate of choice:
Books read recently by J. Zimmerman
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Links.
Booker Prizes
Chocolate.
Books read
Best books read in 2013.
Best writers of poetry and prose
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My chocolate of choice:
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Reader's Bill of Rights [after Daniel Pennac in Better than Life
from November 2003 Utne Magazine] includes the rights to:
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Håkan Nesser, in
Borkmann's Point: an Inspector Van Veeteren mystery
defines Borkmann's Point:
"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." |
{ December : juu-ni-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2013 }
(12.28.2013)
Includes core papers by:
A sampling of her published reviews between 1978 and 1992, which period includes almost a decade as a staff reviewer for American Poetry Review. The peculiar title comes from a poem by J.V. Cunningham, and Kinzie's sympathy with the title may relate to this, one of her many practical comments:
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When poets misunderstand the purpose and proper arena of poetry,
making it do the work of some other endeavor,
one often finds today a form of therapy whose goal is not discovery but confirmation.
... Therapeutic kitsch is designed, above all, to fend criticism off.
And because the first thing a serious critic must do is to expose and dismantle the machinery
of poor art and false feeling, there is inevitably a degree of rancor displayed by a certain
class of professional amateur and self-therapist toward the commentator who takes
the role of critic seriously.
[p. ix] |
Includes "Weeds in Tar", a review of the poetry of Adrienne Rich and an identification of some of its weaknesses:
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What is in doubt is whether such feelings [of 'salacious horror']
warrant communication in this rough, plangent, diaristic form
untouched by proportion, moral discipline, the broader context of virtue and action.
In other words, I would question the use and perhaps even the rectitude of an art
based on the chronic opening of one's sensibilities to anecdotes of victimization.
The imagination becomes hardened not by indifference but by gothicism and violence.
[p. 150] |
A lively supplement to the more formal text books on criminal justice, such as Wayne W. Bennett's Criminal Investigation.
Readable insightful essays on the work of William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, John Donne, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, and other poets.
Ian Rankin's next protagonist is Malcolm Fox and in this second book he seems to be working out as a replacement for Rebus, even if the reader does figure out a lot of the plot before we get there.
FOX books read include:
REBUS books read include:
(2013)
Anne Carson's red doc>.
A sequel to the clearer Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse (1998) One of the best books read in 2007.
Both books revises the Greek legend of the hero Herakles and his adversary (though in Carson's telling, lover) Geryon, a monster that the classical Herakles overcame.
As usual, Carson appears to be having enormous fun and many of her readers do also. But this book does not carry us along the way her previous book did. I was often lost and also disinterested enough not to put in a lot of work on disentangling the meaning. Barbara Carey's September 13, 2013, article (Toronto Star) is helpfully orienting, msuch as by pointing out that Carson [an obsessive repurposer of the classics] includes a "version of Greek theatre's chorus [that] is a collective called 'Wife of Brain'".
The coming of colonialism to Africa, as seen from the view of the colonized. While the near-starvation and the might-makes-right lives of the Africans are not idyllic, the imposition of colonial rule and religion causes great suffering. It ends with a paragraph critiquing the voyeurism of the colonizers, that their Commissioner "had already chosen the title of the book [that he would write] after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger".
Great pictures, artistically modified by PR.
A powerful "Postscript: Nelson Mandela", especially the four-column memoir from Nadine Gordimer.
Mullen is enjoying herself immensely here, I imagine. Her poem 'Dim Lady' starts "My honeybunch's peepers are nothing like neon" and continues in this ilk until she's paraphrased in patois the Shakespearean sonnet. She presents a different (and actually my own) political view of Goldilocks with 'European Folk Tale Variant' ("The way the story goes, a trespassing tow-headed pre-teen barged into the rustic country cottage of a nuclear family of anthropomorphic bruins..."). And she just plain swoons over rhyme and rhythm in the mouth (as in the ten-page 'Jinglejangle' from "ab flab" to "Zulu" and as in Joycian riffs like 'Kristenography'). I can imagine her having a lot of fun reading this work to a slightly mystified audience.
In 1856 in the Kansas Territory, slave boy Henry/Henrietta 'Onion' Shackleford, is liberated from slavery, mistaken for a girl child, and adopted as a mascot by the rambunctious abolitionist John Brown. The story leads up to Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.
The Macintosh cheerleader who twirled through Switching to the Mac, Lion Edition: the Missing Manual brings you similar material, focusing on Version 10.8 of the Mac OS 10 (written Mac OS X).
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There are 200 new features in Mountain Lion [Mac OS 10.8, primarily
compared to Mac OS.7], by Apple's count. (Check out
'what's new in Mountain Lion' in this book's index.)
But some of the changes aren't additions; they're subtractions. ... Lots of things have been renamed, too, so that they match the iPhone/iPad better. |
Parts (Several of which are or include:
See also www.missingmanual.com; click the 'Missing CD-ROM' link; click the book's titles; and see if you can find links to shareware and freeware in the book.
A Macintosh cheerleader twirls his pompoms while looking down his nose at Microsoft; handy in places if you can bypass the politico-religious riffs.
His OS X Mountain Lion Edition: the Missing Manual brings you similar material (identical often), except that Switching to the Mac, Lion Edition: the Missing Manual focuses on wooing Microsoft users.
Parts:
See also www.missingmanual.com; click the 'Missing CD-ROM' link; click the book's titles to get the book's promised links to shareware and freeware.
Includes haiku by poets in "roughly chronological order":
In addition to the delight of the many poets translated, the presentation is instructive: in addition to his translation of each haiku, Ueda gives the original kanji/kana, the romaji, and the literal word-by-word translation.
Translations by Ueda:
2013: Mary Szybist's
Incarnadine,
poetry
winner of the 2013 National Book Award for poetry.
42 poems in 62 pages.
Some of the more interesting poems are "Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle" (p. 14) and "Yet Not Consumed" (p. 42). She offers love, desire, attachment, and a macabre interest in the close examination of things that most people find repulsive (mutilation, the eating of eyes, etc.)
In an interview with Shara Lessley on writing Incarnadine, Szybist said:
| I experiment a lot. Sometimes I allow poems to work toward their form; sometimes I begin with form to provide what Lyn Hejinian describes as an intentional 'field of inquiry' in which to improvise. For me, to write a poem is to experiment with form, or experiment with how different limitations provoke different kinds of language, different imaginations. ... I try to take risks, and I try not to reject them too quickly. I allow myself to sit with them and their possibilities and to try new slants on them. Eventually, something catches. Once it does, I try to lean on the form; I try to let it lead; I try to let it instruct me and take me where I did not know how to go on my own. My best hope as a poet is that my forms can be wiser than I am. |
Courtly love — its psychology and romance.
37 poems in 54 pages.
Her second epigraph quotes Gina Berriault:
| At times it is necessary to grant the name of love to something less than love. |
In addition to blurbs by Donald Justice and Jorie Graham, Robert Hass offers:
| Mary Szybist's poems are about religious and sexual longing and about suspicion of religious and sexual longing. ... This is serious work, so it is occasionally funny and sometimes strange and often beautiful. 'Original research in language,' Ezra Pound said the real thing was. This is it. |
Ribbons
(9, 2) Fall 2013 issue.
Includes a couple of
Tanka by J. Zimmerman,
and
a responsive tanka by her and Patricia J. Machmiller.
Includes a overview essay "Tanka in Sets and Sequences: What Are We Talking About" by M. Kei.
2013: Carl Phillips'
Silverchest,
poetry.
35 passionate poems in 54 pages. From "Interior: All the Leaves Shake off their Light":
[The ghosts] fade like smoke, or a bit like regret. Who cares, anymore, about ghosts? Our ambitions were very high; on occasion, we fell from them — swiftly, without surprise, and very far. Never, though, never would we have called that failure, no — not then, and not now either. For here we are. |
This seems the most readable of the various versions of this romance novel, and to have the presentation and translations of the tanka that I prefer. Compare for example the versions of the first tanka to appear:
| Translator | Poem |
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Royall Tyler
(in two lines) |
Now the end has come, and I am filled with sorrow that our ways must part: the path I would rather take is the one that leads to life. |
|
Arthur Waley
(buried in the text as prose!) | At last! Though that desired at last be come, because I go alone, how gladly would I live! |
|
Helen Craig McCullough
(in five lines, with parallel romaji) |
Grieved beyond measure to say farewell and set forth on this last journey, gladly would I choose instead the road of the living. |
Translated versions of Murasaki Shikibu's Genji:
{ November : juu-ichi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2013 }
Poems from three of her collections:
Books by Nye include:
A bit of a challenge to read, and I did doze off a couple of times, so once I got about 40% through I had the gist (that it's a book of illusions and delusions), I just read the increasingly long chapter summaries of the increasingly small chapters, swooping down on a paragraph or two of the text if something caught my eye on my fly-by. It's not bad but 826 pages was about 413 more than I wanted. Though I would not wish for a simplification of plot or characters, just samplings of many of the conversations rather than the whole Victorian billion yards.
The Luminaries: a Novel won the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
From Miner's Introduction to his book:
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The Western diarist is aware of time as events, the Japanese of time as process.
... [but] the Japanese must seek to arrest, if but for a moment, the transient stream,
to catch the moment before the moon fades into the sky at dawn,
... or to re-create with the private imagination the splendors of those who once claimed the attention
of the world.
[p.5].
One reason why the diaries included poems is that the poems were in fact exchanged or written by the nobility to an extent unparalleled in any period in the West. Rapid, apposite composition was a necessary grace... It was, therefore, much more natural — much more true to life — to include poems in a diary than it ever would have been in the West. ... The frequent use of poems, the breaking away from the daily entry as a formal device, and a stylistic heightening — these are the chief symptoms of Japanese diary literature from classical to modern times. ... the art diary is at once related to fact and freed by art. [p.9] |
The poems (waka then, tanka now) intersperse the prose. This is from the 16th day after the New Year (the 25th day since boarding the ship):
It has been claimed That this is so warm a province That frost never falls, But still among the stormy waves There falls the foaming snow. [p.72]. |
Poems of hope, of finding and gratitude, of generosity.
Books by Nye include:
Poetic prose: one of the best books about landscape and walking. Chapters:
Still to read: his 2nd book, The Wild Places, and his first, Mountains of the Mind.
Following a 42-page introduction, five haibun:
Translations by Yuasa include:
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For her [Bishop], to a degree unusual among her close contemporaries,
the poem was an artifact — something made, something composed — before
it was a medium of expression.
Her work on a poem might take years, but when it was done, it was done.
[p. x] |
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I get along better on boredom & adversity than on gaiety &,
relatively speaking, success.
Elizabeth Bishop [quoted on p. 147] |
Its sections, each with a small introductory essay and a generous sample of poems, several of which were new to me, are:
See also her:
Gaudí (1852-1926) was a visionary Spanish architect and a "genius in controlling materials and space".
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Originality means going back to our origins.
Antonio Gaudí |
Very informative on how we have become who we are, especially in the fields of war, religion, and mental health.
Modern Scholar courses taken:
A joy to learn more of Buson's life and to read Ueda's translations of a large number of Buson's poems, of which Ueda (p. 157) says 2849 are hokku are know.
2013: Traveling Sprinkler: a Novel
by Nicholson Baker.
So laugh-out-loud obsessive that I probably have to re-read it soon.
One of the best books read in 2013.
Books by Baker:
Traveling Sprinkler: a Novel.
Revisiting our quote-hero-unquote from Baker's
The Anthologist,
we find he has lost his girlfriend for whom he longs as for music (particularly the bassoon he
once played); discovers an obsession with smoking cigars.
One of the best books read in 2013.
The Anthologist:
his brilliant hymn to poetry (well, formal poetry) and to procrastination. Read it and learn!
One of the best books read in 2010.
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization: nonfiction.
Stark and dramatic documentation of the words of contemporary reports in the half century leading up
to World War II.
A Box of Matches.
Innocent; slow and meditative.
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996).
Essay written since 1982.
{ October : juu-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2013 }
(10.28.2013)
On the one hand, it's interesting to see how mathematics can predict multiple universes, and to potter in the fields of speculation.
On the other hand, while Greene is convincing that our universe could be described by mathematics, what he seems to want (yet after stating it as if fact, thankfully yet quietly tiptoes away from in the end of the book) is that whatever mathematics can describe must exist.
A 24-page introduction to this type of poetry and to translating it is followed by free verse by 27 poets (but no prose poems or haibun, tanka by 9 (Mokichi Saitō's and the (unrelated) Fumi Saitō's works are especially interesting), and haiku by 13.
My favorite haiku are by Hekigodō Kawahigashi (1873-1937), a student of Shiki Masaoka, such as:
Flashes of lightning in the interval between the fireworks — now! |
His first essay, "Auden Twice" includes:
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There are limits, of course, but in general one can say that it
hardly matters which good book one reads but, rather, the quality of attention given it.
... The writing of verse is a civic, judgeable, rational activity, the result of skill.
The writing of poetry is an asocial, unjudgeable, irrational activity,
the result of inspiration.
An essentially moral engagement with the world, which is one sign of a great poet,
to my mind, is not signalled by schools or churches, and is certainly not signaled
by one-cause political positions. Politics is to morality as a rainmaker is to God,
or a cloud to heaven.
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The lecturer is knowledgeable but seems nervous and stilted, and the recording oddly repeats a sentence every few minutes, as if no one had proof-listened to the recording.
Other Modern Scholar courses:
Haunting.
This text is of the Buddhist canon, consisting the words of the Buddha and attributed directly to Shakyamuni. Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) is one of 108 volumes translated from the Sanskrit.
This seems the most readable of the various versions, and to have the presentation and translations of the tanka that I prefer.
Stafford's gentle spirit shines though his subsequent 1986 collection of 'Views on the Writer's Vocation', You Must Revise Your Life seems stronger and more practical. It includes comment on putting together a new book and on teaching students and on poems.
See also Helen Craig McCullough's translation of The Tale of Genji.
Isle Royale (Lake Superior) National Park: the 14th book in this series again has a mysogynistic psychopath in sheep's clothing among wolves and wolf researchers.
Again, Barr must have been reading texts on criminal behavior recently, as this book is so heavy handedly dark.
It was a book-on-cd from the library so I listened to the first and last disks and happily skipped the rest (despite a good reading by Barbara Rosenblatt).
Following an introduction, three sections:
A more substantial body of work than the Between the Floating Mist: Poems of Ryokan (1992), translations by Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro.
The Lowland: A Novel (2013)
by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Spans four generations in India and New England. Shows how the personal intertwines with the political, how some people are loyal to people and some to ideal, and how various people cope with anger when they feel betrayed. Well-written but one needs to have a little patience getting in to in: the first sections are less interesting than the later material.
The Lowland appears (September 2013) on the 2013 Man Booker Prize short list.
The chapter on Japanese culture and its relevance to Japanese assimilation is particularly insightful. The chapter on the treatment of the Japanese in the USA during World War Two (particularly the concentration camps in which they were installed) gives new insight to those difficult experiences.
A quotation from her response at a poetry reading to the question of where she was going with her poetry:
| You're humble before the empty page and before the future, because you just don't know where you are going. |
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reflect, I think, a continuing concern, and, more important, a never-flagging
fascination with the two ideas I discovered as a student:
(1) every aspect of the production should reflect the idea of the play;
(2) the purpose of the play is to bring to the stage the life of the soul.
... My makeup today is the same as it was eighteen years ago, essentially that of an unsure student who has finally discovered an idea in which he can believe, and who feels unless he clutches and dedicates himself to that idea, he will be lost. [p. vii] |
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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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