My chocolate of choice:
Books read recently by J. Zimmerman
|
My chocolate of choice:
|
|
Reader's Bill of Rights [after Daniel Pennac in Better than Life
from November 2003 Utne Magazine] includes the rights to:
 Skip pages
Not read
Not finish
Not defend your tastes
|
|
Agatha Christie:
'Three months seems like a reasonable time to write a book, if one can get down to it.' Quoted at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/agatha_christie/12503.shtml |
{ June : roku-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2016 }
(6.28.2016)
Yann Martel's
The High Mountains of Portugal: a novel (2016).
Three novella sequenced into a book, telling of Portuguese people separated by several decades. Written in exaggerated style, amusing in the parts about the chimpanzee adopted by a retiring senator.
Almost 600 pages, over half of which are her summaries of a hundred novels that she read during three years, the remainder of the pages being her analysis of what is a novel and how it has developed in ten centuries.
Poems with full-page and intriguing color reproductions of her part-abstract-part-representational art.
|
Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture (1980),
by Mario Salvadori.
Almost every page has delicate and precise drawings to illustrate the informative text. Chapters:
|
(6.16.2016)
Set in fifteenth century France and England, mostly at the court of the disassociated King Henry VI and his hands-on queen Margaret of Anjou, who tries too hard to empower the House of Lancaster above all others but especially the Richard Duke of York. The history is interesting, the writing less so.
47.2 (Summer 2016) of
Modern Haiku.
Includes a haiku by moi.
early dusk
the tramp folds and refolds
his tarpaulin
J. Zimmerman (2016)
|
It also includes a haiku on p. 116 by vincent tripi:
Last day of Autumn
a leaf
color I've never seen
vincent trip (2016)
|
I noticed it because it's somewhat similar (and if it's deliberate then should I appreciate an "homage"?) to mine published two years earlier in Bottle Rockets August 2014 (written 2012):
last day of the year
a bird I've never seen before
sings in the garden
J. Zimmerman (2014)
|
Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (issue 20, 2016)
which includes a
tanka by J. Zimmerman.
Compare with the remarkable two volumes of Basho's Haiku: Literal Translations for Those Who Wish To Read the Original Japanese Text, with Grammatical Analysis and Explanatory Notes translated and annotated by Toshiharu Oseko. The first volume appeared in 1990 and the second in 1996, published in Tokyo: Maruzen.
Witty in parts, boring in larger parts. Sound more like a New York dentist disconnecting from reality but others seem to find it a "religious thriller". Over-hyped.
{ May : go-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2016 }
|
Completed the remarkable two volumes of
Basho's Haiku: Literal Translations for Those Who
Wish To Read the Original Japanese Text, with Grammatical Analysis
and Explanatory Notes
translated and annotated by Toshiharu Oseko.
The first volume appeared in 1990 and the second in 1996,
published in Tokyo: Maruzen.
One of the best books read in 2016. |
(5.30.2016)
Struggling though
Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen: a Novel (2016).
The female protagonist, Veblen, was named for Thorstein Veblen, the economist who invented the term 'conspicuous consumption' and for whom we now have the term Veblen good: a product bought as a status symbol and/or as item of conspicuous consumption.
Set in the present day and in the San Francisco area. The difficulty is that the cast has many characters that are too strongly stereotyped: an annoyingly and relentless cheerful squirrel-befriending protagonist; her hypochodriacal mother; the protagonist's physician-and-inventor fiancé who seeks fame and fortune (until he is shocked, shocked! to discover their methods) via pharmaceutical companies and the DoD; the fiancé's hippie parents; a pharma-babe; and many more.
The riddles are grouped by natural phenomena, Christian, birds, other animals, domestic subjects, writing, music, weapons and fighting, horn, miscellaneous, runes, the 'obscene' riddles, and fragments.
A third-generation (sensei) Japanese-American, Claire writes clearly and poignantly about experiences of life and death. See especially: "At Seven and Nine, My Niece and Nephew Know" and "e;Tale of Hair for My Mother"e;.
Just because his work is beautiful and his style is unique, I put it in my list of best books read in 2016.
With less hand-waving about the plot it could have made the list of best books read in 2016.
On the short list for The 2015 Booker Prizes.
Not bad with a sense of communal urban life (in-the-current-culture of the African American) all around him, interleaved with American history (e.g., the preamble of the constitution) and African American figures in that culture Sometimes interesting but sometimes overwritten, like unrhymed academic rap trying hard to be hip and dense. And being an academic, he has his share of philosophers (Heraclitus, St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Occam, and Gassendi).
Other books by Haruki Murakami:
Frogpond (39:1, 2016),
the haiku journal of HSA,
arrived 2 months and 1 week later than last year's "Winter" issue of Frogpond,
likely because it is under new editorship
While I'm pleased that it includes a haiku by moi, the issue has only 104 pages (compared to 140 in its preceding 38:3, 2015, issue), and only 25 pages (24% of the issue) are solo haiku (compared to 50 pages (36%) in that previous issue). The haiku are alphabetic by last name, thereby highlighting the A's and putting the Z's in the rear of the cattle wagon.
12 pages (12% of the total) are haibun; the previous issue made wiser use of space by allowing 22 haibun to share 11 pages (8% of total).
The most interesting article is Deborah P. Kolodji's 11-page "Understanding the Larger Pond: Raising Awareness and Spreading Haiku Literacy".
2016: The new issue of HPNC's journal
Mariposa 34.
Includes a haiku by moi.
Especially admire:
far above
the nuclear reactor
River of Stars
pjm [p.10]
crescent winter moon
why did I settle
for so little
Betty Arnold [p.22]
|
About 50 new poems follow about 90 poems from four of his earlier books (2002 to 2011). The usual cheery, conversational tone pervades, with relatively few disappointing poems and a few rather good ones.
{ April : shi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2016 }
(4.30.2016)
Jungian analyst telling and embellishing folk tales and interpreting them as metaphors for women's self-realization. Middle-class but interesting.
Mainly the tribulations of her eight years as First Lady to husband Bill Clinton. I appreciate especially her stories about her daughter, Chelsea, who sounds very lively, and a little more insight into her husband's betrayal of their marriage contract, as well as her brief but meaningful times with Jackie Kennedy.
Five sections of the novel "Free Women" interleaved by sections from four sections from four notebooks, ultimately superseded when the protagonist uses the single (and golden-covered) notebook for the disparate strands of her life that she previously tried to segregate into separate notebooks.
Lessing's "Introduction: 1971", written for a reprinting of the book, is specially worth reading. It opens:
|
The shape of this novel is as follows:
There is a skeleton, or frame, called Free Women, which is a conventional short
novel, about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself.
But it is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four Notebooks,
Black, Red, Yellow and Blue.
The Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women.
She keeps four, and not one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things
off from each other, out of fear of chaos, or formlessness — of breakdown.
Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks; a heavy black line is drawn across the page
of one after another.
But now that they are finished, from their fragments can come something new,
The Golden Notebook.
|
|
I was so immersed in writing this book, that I didn't think about how it might be received.
I was involved not merely because it was hard to write — keeping the plan of it in my head
(I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult — but because of
what I was learning as I wrote. Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations
for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it. All sorts of ideas
and experiences I didn't recognize as mine emerged when writing. The actual time of writing,
then, and not only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was really
traumatic: it changed me. Emerging from this crystalling process, handing the manuscript to
publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war,
and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.
[p. xiv-xv] |
|
But my major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment,
a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
As I have said, this was not noticed.
|
It ends:
|
... questions of what people see when the read a book, and why one person sees one pattern
and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture
of a book, that is seen so very differently by its readers.
... it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it — his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the plan and shape and intention is also the moment when there isn't anything more to be got out of it. And when a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the
reader as it is to the author — then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside,
as having had its day, and start again on something new.
|
Includes history of the lighthouse, its construction, its Fresnel lens, and the lamp, as well as information of several people who worked at the lighthouse or visited it or worked with people who lived there. Interspersed are quotations from the Master Lighthouse Keeper logs of the fifth principal keeper, Allen S. Luce (who was in charge 1871-1893), and the sixth principal keeper, Emily Fish (1893-1914).
These are poems from the Japanese through many centuries. Many are translated by Cobb but ten other translators are listed.
The Art from the British Museum's collection of Japanese are paired with the haiku, making this a remarkably beautiful collection.
Harold Bloom's Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is useful in interpreting (if sometimes extravagantly) what Hamlet means to him, but none so helpful as Cumberbatch.
Sub-sections include:
Books read by Pema Chödrön include:
After a few pages of introductory overview, the author delves into a tree-by-tree and branch-by-branch tour of the forest.
Drabble's read include:
James spends appropiate real-estate explaining why he (like moi) was reluctant to watch GOT, including:
| ... didn't need explicit scenes of sex and torture as well, but the showrunners piled them on. Personally I could have done without the torture altogether. A scream from the other side of a closed door is usually enough to convince me. |
James' second-highest praise goes to the work of Charles Dance as the overlord Tywin Lannister:
| the best role of its kind that anyone has ever had... The role gives Dance the delectable opportunity to play to his natural bent as an upmarket authority figure for four solid seasons, thereby stamping his image into the global public consciousness to a depth that his previous career had barely suggested... Tywin is a figure of authority ... But Tywin is also a philosopher on the subject of power, with his every precept learned first from experience and then refined by his understanding... There was never a more persuasively thoughtful transmitter of bitterly cured wisdom... Tywin is wise from his mistakes, ruthless in his realism, an armed prophet after Machiavelli's heart. He's a character who reaches deep into the psyche: we may not forgive him his cruelties, but we find it hard to question his right to rule. |
Which brings us to Peter Dinklage, who, as the dwarf Tyrion Lannister:
| had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors look too tall. It was a deserved success: his face is a remarkable instrument of expression over which he has complete professional control, and his voice is a thing of rare beauty... Tyrion is the embodiment, in a small body, of the show's prepolitical psychological range. A perpetual victim of injustice, he yet has a sense of justice: circumstances can't destroy his inner certainty that there are such things as fairness, love, and truth... he is the epitome of the story's moral scope. His big head is the symbol of his comprehension, and his little body the symbol of his incapacity to act upon it. Tyrion Lannister is us, bright enough to see the world's evil, but not strong enough to change it. |
A brilliant collection showing you the "best" of the thousand or so haiku written in seventh-century Japan by Basho.
Oseko's annotations are a powerful complement to his translations and are both fascinating and delightful to read.
A comparison of Jane Reichhold's book of Basho translations with the two volumes translated by Oseko. They have similar numbers of haiku:
| Oseko (1990): "literal" translation of 979 haiku in 2 vols (total size 10.5" high, 7.5" wide, 2.5" thick). Unnumbered pages. 330 haiku in first volume and 649 in second volume. |
| Reichhold (2008): translation of 1012 haiku in 1 vol (size 9.5" high, 6.5" wide, 1" thick). 431 pages. |
Because of Oseko's annotations, I recommend him strongly over Reichhold for someone wanting to study Basho work in a deep context of Japanese culture.
See a comparison of the books of translations by Reichhold with those of Oseko.
One of the most sensitive and meaningful interpretations of Good points include:
Less successful aspects include:
Read issue 36 (Spring 2016) of Acorn.
Includes a haiku by moi.
Especially admire:
strokes of wind
brush the beach house
the slow unpainting
Barbara Snow [p.48]
sticks and stones
my father asks me
for my name
John McManus [p. 18]
|
One of the
Best books read in 2016.
Delightful to have the originals in their native languages (English for Amelia and Japanese for Saeko) as well as their translation into the other language.
The enthusiastic Preface by Robert D. Wilson adds to the reader's appreciations.
Books by Amelia Fielden include:
Of the book's six sections, the central "Light-Particles" section brings alive some of the poet's heritage, combining family history, community history, and the sensory details that enliven the poems for the reader.
Amelia Fielden at al's responsive
tanka
collection:
Colouring In: The Four Seasons of Four Poets (2016).
"Using the seasons as an organizing principle in this work [by poets from the North and the South hemispheres] ... spring is always spring, no matter the name of the month it may occur in." [from Sonja Arntzen's introduction].
The companion poets are Gerry Jacobson, Genie Nakano, and Neal Whitman. "Fluttering Gold" by Amelia and Genie (which I admired on its first publication in Skylark) is one of the better examples of the poets being attuned to the "responsiveness" aspect of these collaborative poems.
Books by Amelia Fielden include:
|
Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
|
|
Check our disclaimer.
Copyright © 2016-2016 by J. Zimmerman. |