Books read recently by J. Zimmerman

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{ June : junio (see also books on learning Spanish)) 2008 }

(6.30.2008)

• Finished listening to a CD of When will Jesus bring the pork chops?, read by its author, the recently dead George Carlin. Nice to hear him raging at all the things he used to rage at, particularly our euphamisms and mis-speaks, even when I think: "George, get a grip, cut some of the swear words, The Wire uses them more creatively".

• Finished listening to Mrs. Pollifax Pursued (1995) by Dorothy Gilman, read well by Barbara Rosenblat.

  An excessively "cozy" thriller. Nice to listen to while sorting out and recycling the household.

• Finished After the Quake: Stories by Haruki Murakami. (Sometimes his name is written in the Japanese sequence, Murakami Haruki, with his family name before his given name).

  Interesting. 6 stories in 181 pages, so each story is substantial. Some are surreal; most have an interesting plot and protagonist. My favorites are: "thailand" and "honey pie" (the latter might be somewhat self-revealing), while my favorite quotation is (from "super-frog saves tokyo"):

  Each and every one of us is a being of limited duration: all of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose.

• Owls and Other Fantasies byMary Oliver.

• 1-month birthday of my Environmental Ethics Blog.
• Day 2 of Environmental Ethics Course (summer intensive).
• Day 2 of Linguistics Course (summer intensive).

• Day 1 of Environmental Ethics Course (summer intensive).
• Day 1 of Linguistics Course (summer intensive).

• Red Bird by Mary Oliver.

• Watched the Gems in the supplemental DVD of Red Dwarf Series 6.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• Realizing the power of now [an in-depth retreat with Eckhart Tolle], a 6-CD recording of a retreat with Eckhart Tolle, expressing his brand of Eclectic Spirituality.

• Abandoned dipping into The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu in a 1994 translation by Helen Craig McCullough.

• God's Silence (2006) by Franz Wright.

• Finished Small Gods (1992) by Terry Pratchett.

  Slow start. Philosophy versus political religion versus a-political religion.

• Finished Foe by J.M. Coetzee, a frequent Booker Prize nominee and winner of the 1999 Booker Prize (with Disgrace) and the 1983 Booker Prize (with Life & Times of Michael K).

  Other books by Coetze read:

  • Diary of a Bad Year.

  The book is mainly letters by Susan Barton to Daniel Foe (pen-name Daniel Defoe and author of hundreds of pamphlets and books) telling how she was set adrift from a ship (en route from Brazil to Lisbon), struggled ashore on a remote island, and there: "I presented myself Robinson Cruso, in the days when he still ruled over his island, and became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday".

  Susan tracks down the debt-riddled Foe to promote the story of the island, though Foe is dubious: "'The island is not a story in itself,' said Foe gently".

  Ultimately I could take his protagonist not only as a real woman but as a Muse/succubus to Foe (a.k.a. Defoe). The book feels like how a novelist might wander toward his story, with characters appearing, being interpreted in different ways, and disappearing.

• Watched the second three episodes of Series 6 of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which (given 6 episodes each in Series 1-5) are:
  34. Emohawk: Polymorph II.
  35. Rimmerworld.
  36. Out of Time.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.

  The authors explain their "philogagging" neologism ("using jokes to illustrate arcane philosophical precepts"):

  The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in similar ways. That's because philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.

  Subjects/chapters:

  1. metaphysics
  2. logic
  3. epistemology
  4. ethics
  5. philosophy of religion
  6. existentialism
  7. philosophy of language
  8. social and political philosophy
  9. relativity
  10. meta-philosophy

  See also Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington: Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.

• The Best American Essays 2007 edited and with an introduction by David Foster Wallace; Robert Atwan, series editor.

• The Room of Past and Present, poems from the 15th annual Santa Cruz High School Poetry Competition. Some very fine work, including "Años" by Vincente Becerra.

• Reluctantly completed and returned to the library: Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate by Alice Medrich.

• Most interesting essay in The New Yorker (9 and 16 June 2008) is Louis Menard's "The Pound Error: The Elusive Master of Allusion" (pp. 123-127).

  Discusses Pound's poetry, including his The Pisan Cantos, which we reported as appearing as 7th on the USA Best 13 from 1999 list by Weekend Edition (presented by commentator Douglas Brinkley). Menard [p. 124] calls The Pisan Cantos: "the finest thing that Pound ever wrote. It's the one place in his work where his learning is fused with genuine personal feeling" and also writes [p. 125]: "The Pisan Cantos is a Fascist poem without apologies".

  Also discusses Pound himself, his attitudes to poetry (particularly his promotion of Imagism and Vorticism), and his enthusiastic embrace of Fascism.

• Abandoned listening to The Anatomy lesson by Philip Roth.
  Story itself has a boring, self-obsessed protagonist. The almost monotone reading by George Guidall adds to my sorrow.

• Completed Je'oan D'ark Limoncello Truffles (et al.) for my Chocolate class final.

  Pretty nifty!

• Watched first three episodes of Series 6 of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which (given 6 episodes each in Series 1-5) are:
  31. Psirens.
  32. Legion.
  33. The Emmy Award Winner: Gunmen of the Apocalypse.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others. Series 6 of Red Dwarf includes the Emmy Award Winner: Gunmen of the Apocalypse: Brilliant concept and implementation. Includes immersion computer gaming in an Artificial Reality Unit and a battle with the ultimate computer virus. The Bug crash on a molten planet is the most dramatic of any episode. Yeeeee-aaaaaah! Series 4 of Red Dwarf is second only to the brilliant Series 2 of Red Dwarf.

{ May : mayo (see also books on learning Spanish)) 2008 }

(5.29.2008)

• Finished a book of poems, District and Circle (2006) by Seamus Heaney.

  Not bad.

• Finished a book of poems, Thieves of Paradise (1998) by Yusef Komunyakaa.

  I disliked the poems in the start of the book, so I did my usual Plan B, and read the book backward: the more interesting poems are towards the end.

  Sections:

  • Way Stations: 15 poems.
  • Tropic of Capricorn: 15 poems.
  • Quatrains for Ishi: 1 poem.
  • The Glass Ark: 1 poem.
  • Debriefing Ghosts: 15 prose poems. "A Reed Boat" is great, ending:
    "He [a boatman] balances on his boat of Ra, turning left and right, reaching through and beyond, as if the day is a woman he can pull into his arms." "The Deck" is also strong, ending: "So many questions I wanted to ask, but no they've been answered with as much salt and truth as we can expect from the living."
  • Testimony: 1 poem.
  • The Blue Hour: 15 poems. Favorites include: "Blessing the Animals" and "The Monkey House". "Anodyne" also is recommended.

• Finished reading my favorite chapters of Literary and Art Theories in Japan (1998) by Makoto Ueda:
  
  • 1. Poetry as Emotional Expression: Tsurayuki on the Art of Lyric Poetry.
  • 2. Truth and Falsehood in Fiction: Lady Murasaki on the Art of the Novel.
  • 3. Verse-Writing as a Game: Yoshimoto on the Art of Linked Verse.
  • 10. Impersonality in Poetry; Bashō on the Art of the Haiku.

  Skilled and detailed presentation.

• Birth of my Environmental Ethics Blog.

(5.25.2008)

• Listened to Mortal Prey (2002) by John Sandford (Pulitzer prize-winner John Camp), read by Richard Feronne.

  Detective Lucas Davenport matches luck and wits with a resourceful serial killer; mainly centered on St. Louis.

  Books read in this series:

  Title (alphabetic)	Series ordinal	Year
  Broken Prey	16th	2005
  Invisible Prey	17th	2007
  Mind Prey	7th	1995
  Mortal Prey	13th	2002
  Naked Prey	14th	2003
  Night Prey	6th	1994
  Rules of Prey	1st	1989
  Secret Prey	9th	1997
  Sudden Prey	8th	1996

• Watched the Gems in the supplemental DVD of Red Dwarf Series 5.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• Abandoned attempting The Steps of the Sun by Walter S. Tevis. Writing seems clumsy.

• Finished Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee, a frequent Booker Prize nominee and winner of the 1999 Booker Prize (with Disgrace) and the 1983 Booker Prize (with Life & Times of Michael K).

  I LOVE the way that Coetzee has given us four works in parallel, with paragraphs from two or three on the same page, interrelating and arguing with each other. They are:

  1. A sequence of essays, stuffy and sometimes pretentious, said to be written in response to an invitation to write that he perceives as "An opportunity to grumble in public ... how could I refuse?" [p. 23]; first section of each page in the first part ("Strong Opinions") of the book. Though this is somewhat boring and I confess to having skimmed or even skipped some of the material. But it is a little more palatable after tearing through the first part of the book reading only the last two sections on each page. And it's not all bad: on p. 47, Coetzee refers to the enthralling Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (edited by Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink).

  2. A more human and readable set of notes; first section of each page in the second part ("Second Diary") of the book.

  3. An unreliable-narrator or diary POV of the elderly man (called "Señor C" by his young secretary) authoring those essays and notes; the second section on the page for most of the book.

  4. The POV of the young, tarty, moral woman whom the man hires as his typist while writing these essays; the third section on the page for most of the book; also the second section in a few chapters. She speaks for many of us when imploring "Señor C" to stop his "know-it-all tone". Hers are the comments that I am most sympathetic with, such as:

     You put yourself forward as a lone voice of conscience speaking up for human rights and so forth, but I ask myself,     If he really believes in these human rights, why isn't he out in the real world fighting for them? What is his track record?     And the answer, according to my researches, is: His track record is not so hot. In fact his track record is virtually blank.     [p. 197.]

• Opera: Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado

• Finished dipping into: The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop.

• Finished listening to Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters; narrated clearly with well-inflected accents by Juanita McMahon; she could certainly have done better justice to The Night Ferry than its narrator.

  This is a feminist-Odyssey type of story of girl-meets-girl-girl-loses-girl then girl-sells-out then girl-meets-true-love then girl-becomes-political-performer-and-reconnects-with-her-roots. However, the book is much better, particularly in historical details and culture, than the glossy movie based upon it. But the book dwells overly luridly on its more pornographic scenes and could be usefully cut in places.

• Watched the second three episodes of Series 5 of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which (given 6 episodes each in Series 1-4) are:
  28. Quarantine.
  29. Demons and Angels.
  30. Back To Reality.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• Finished listening to the amazing THE SPOKEN WORD TREASURY: 100 MODERN AMERICAN POETS READING THEIR POEMS, VOLUME III , on a set of six CDs from the recordings by Luce and Arthur Klein. Hearing the poets read their own poems makes sense of the works more deeply than reading them on the page, and lets one then read other of their poems informed by the remembered timbres of the poet's voice. Each poet's reading is prefaced by a commentary on their life and work. The poets on the six CDs are:
  1. Brooks, G. -- Smith, W. J. -- Meredith, W. -- Swenson, M. -- Nemerov, H. -- Ferlinghetti, L.
  2. Wilbur, R. -- Moss, H. -- Hecht, A. -- Dickey, J. -- Simpson, L.
  3. Leverov, D. -- Booth, P. -- Snodgrass, W. D. -- Merrill, J. -- Creeley, R. -- Ginsberg, A.
  4. Wagoner, D. -- Bly, Robert -- Kinnell, G. -- Ashbery, J. -- Wright, J.
  5. Davison, P. -- Hall, D. -- Sexton, A. -- Rich, A. -- Pack, R.
  6. Hollander, J. -- Updike, J. -- Plath, Sylvia -- Strand, M. -- Kelly, R.

  An interesting aside on "deep image" poetry: the commentary on Robert Kelly says that he invented (with Jerome Rothenberg) the term "deep image" to signify poetry that is stylized, heroic, and (in the longer poems) a catalog of images. The poems that Kelly reads here are somewhat in that vein, and read with an attempt to approximate Dylan Thomas, though the poetry lacks Thomas' musicality and rhymes. Robert Bly, also on this CD set, is often called a "deep image" poet.

  See also THE SPOKEN WORD TREASURY: 100 MODERN AMERICAN POETS READING THEIR POEMS, VOLUME II from Yvor Winters to Robert Lowell (1920s to 1960s).

• Read deeper and deeper: first prize haiku (YTHS, 2003), a booklet for the 1978-2003 First Place Winners of the Yuki Teikei's Annual Kiyoshi Tokutomi Memorial Contest.

• Read Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (issue 4, 2008) which includes Tanka of J. Zimmerman. Excellent specialty journal.

• Finished His Illegal Self by Peter Carey.

  Che (Jay) David Selkirk (b. 23 July 1965) is abducted at aged seven from his maternal grandmother for his mother by his first baby sitter, Anna (the dialectician) Xenos.

  The story is told from the view points of Che and of Anna. The gradual unfolding of the tale, with its many unknowns and never-to-be-knowns, fascinates. At heart, it's about how the child of rebels is taken on the lam (or "lamb") and brought to experience and delight (in hippie outback Queensland) in a fringe lifestyle similar to one experienced in part by his own parents. Their main hippie inductor is Trevor, who

  wearing underpants out of some perverse politeness, was shoveling, grunting, the muscles on his back shaded with dirt like charcoal on good linen. [p. 264.]

  As a minor priestess of the cult of "Read the last chapter if the book bogs down", I was reading the last chapter after the first dozen pages. But eventually I worked my way linearly through the book, at which point I had the delight of seeing how totally earned and redemptive and necessary was the final chapter.

  His Theft: a Love Story (a nominee for the 2006 Booker Prize) was livelier, but this book may be the more believable in terms of its emotional truth.

• Finished listening to The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham.

  As with the other books in this series, uses the Robothom formula of saving children in peril. An okay book, but poorly read by Clare Corbett, whose idea of doing a regional accent is mainly to lower the pitch of her voice. Her American, Welsh, and even Dutch accents are wobbly, inconsistent, and inauthentic. Her ability to differentiate upper and lower class is muddy.

  By contrast, Robotham's second book in this series, Lost, was brilliantly read (actually 'performed') by Ray Lonnen, including wonderful Scouse, Brummie, Geordie, and other north-country English accents as well as various upper-class and lower-class London accents.

  Both Lost and his first book, Suspect, were more compact and engaging than this one, but most of the blame for this reading of The Night Ferry rests not with the page-turner novel but with the poor character differentiation by narrator Clare Corbett.

• Abandoned dipping into Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie.
  The book is livelier when there is conversation, but the descriptions are lengthy and drag.

• Finished Making Money (2007) by Terry Pratchett.

  The main characters (apart from the vibrant Mr. Fusspot) are characters we have seen before: Moist ("I wonder ... am I really a bastard or am I just really good at thinking like one" p. 151), Lord Vetinari, and Igor ('an' Igor), who comes into his own on p. 196:

  "What are you doing to this poor man," Moist yelled.     "Changing hith mind, thur," said Igor, pulling a huge knife switch.

  The pivotal new character is ha-ha-HA-HAHA Hubert:

  In Hubert's head, the rising terror of crowds was overturned by the urge to impart knowledge to the ignorant, which meant everyone except him. ... He cleared his throat.

• Watched first three episodes of Series 5 of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which (given 6 episodes each in Series 1-4) are:
  25. Holoship.
  26. The Inquisitor.
  27. Terrorform.

  '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.

{ April : abril (see also books on learning Spanish)) 2008 }

(4.28.2008)

• Abandoned dipping into The Queen's gambit, by Walter Tevis.
  Just didn't get into it. Maybe at this point it's just too dated.

• Opera: Gilbert and Sullivan's Gondoliers

• Finished dipping into On Writing Well (5e, 1994), by William K. Zinsser.
  Excellent, particularly the first eight sections.

• Abandoned dipping into SEEK!, a reprinting of rather self-absorbed "selected nonfiction" by Rudy Rucker.
  His "essays" read like journal entries or letters home to someone that cares.

• Watched the Gems in the supplemental DVD of Red Dwarf Series 4.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• Finished Interesting Times (1994) by Terry Pratchett.

  A wily and complex plot, with at least five different groups plotting to overthrow the evil Emperor of "the Counterweight continent ... Where five noble families have fought one another for centuries ... The Hongs, the Sungs, the Tangs, the McSweeneys, and the Fangs" which is what the parallel universe we inhabit might call 'Ancient China'. Too delightfully baroque to summarize here, so read the book for the characters, the plot, and the hilarious richness of puns.

• Income Tax Filing Deadline. Hence the lack of good reading opportunities in the past week. If the USA were a more enlightened democracy, the tax form would let us check-off what proportion of our tax we wanted to go for education or health care or domestic law and order or farm subsidies or drug subsidies, pork barrel projects or imperial expansion and world domination led by the U.S.A. President, currently George W. Bush.

• Fallen Leaves ( haiku)
  by Roger Abe, Laura Bell, Rich Krivcher, and Eugenie Walteufel.
  Chapbook of the 11th Two Autumns Reading Series sponsored by the Haiku Poets of Northern California.

• Watched the second three episodes of Series 4 of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which (given 6 episodes each in Series 1-3) are:
  22. White Hole.
  23. Dimension Jump.
  24. Meltdown.

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• The Archer's Tale
  by Bernard Cornwell.
  Book two of his 14th century story.

  An altogether much bloodier and less enjoyable volume than its predecessor, Cornwell's The Archer's Tale

  Contains more than you need to know about torture. The military strategy is interesting but the actual fighting is horrendous.

(4.08.2008)

The Children of Men by P. D. James. Amazing book, in the tradition of Orwell's 1984 and Waugh's When the Kissing had to Stop. Interesting to compare the book The Children of Men with the movie Children of Men.

(4.04.2008)

• Finished (for now) dipping into Character and Neurosis: an Integrative View by Claudio Naranjo.

  See attributes of the Enneagram Nine for Naranjo's attributions of the ruling passion of each enneagram type (such as Anger for Ones); the tendency to fixate cognitively (such as in Resentment for Ones); and the chief feature (such as Perfectionism for Ones).

  Naranjo is highly respected in the Enneagram field. His role is perhaps more as an expert's expert than as a teacher of an Enneagram tourist such as moi, and so the book is just a little too complex and in-its-own-world jargony as yet. Maybe one to return to.

• The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine Faces of the Soul by Sandra Maitri
  Terrific. Provides a rich set of dimensions for looking at the Enneagram. While Maitri credits Naranjo enormously as her teacher, her clarity of writing and ideas significantly exceed those of Naranjo.

(4.03.2008)

• The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop.

  Completed as much as I could of her unpublished poems that supplement her four poetry books. The translations are interesting. Her previously unpublished poems tend to a lower caliber and interest than those she chose to published.

(4.02.2008)

• Read Questions of Travel (poetry) by Elizabeth Bishop.

(4.01.2008)

• Watched first three episodes of Series 4 of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which (given 6 episodes each in Series 1-3) are:
  19. Camille.
  20. D.N.A.
  21. Justice.

  '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.

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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