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." |
{ September : ku-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2013 }
(9.30.2013)
Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years
edited by Jim Kacian, Philip Rowland, and Allan Burns; introduced by Billy Collins.
A collection of English-language
haiku
that the editors consider to have contributed significantly
to the development of English-language
haiku.
Contains a delightful group travel haibun "In the Autumn Wind: Offa's Dyke: A Haibun Travel Journal", edited by Stephen Henry Gill and Fred Schofield, with haiku by poets that participated in the five-day mountain tromp on uneven ground through rain, descended cloud, and wind.)
[The editors' convention is "Basho" rather than "Bashō".]
Still, it was almost pleasant to revisit the arithmetic, algebra, and geometry of high school, and to glimpse mathematicians and ideas that leapt beyond what I had previously learned.
A gorgeous book. Very beautiful art work accompanying essays on the origins and alterations of the ideograms adopted and adapted from the Chinese originally) into the Japanese writing.
See also An Introduction to Japanese Calligraphy by Suzuki Yuuko.
If zen koans never made sense to you, read this book. They may still not make analytical sense. But they might make emotional sense.
His introduction includes:
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Koans ... encourage you to make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind
and to approach your life more as a work of art.
The surprise they offer is the one that art offers: inside unpredictability you will
find not chaos but beauty.
... Koans show you that you can depend on creative moves. ... Koans encourage doubt and curiosity. ... Koans rely on uncertainty as a path to happiness. ... Koans will undermine your reasons and your explanations. ... Koans lead you to see life as funny rather than tragic. ... Koans will change your idea of who you are, and this will require courage. ... Koans uncover a hidden kindness in life. [pp. 11-13] |
Chapters:
The commemorative anthology of the recent HNA (Haiku North America) conference.
The book is not a traditional novel but a collection of short stories interspersed with two pieces of prose poetry. (Is it classed as a "novel" because that has more cachet than a short story collection?) The first half of the stories are set in a shantytown in Zimbabwe, and told conversationally by a ten-year-old girl who experiences near-starvation, family love and loss, dangers primarily from adults, and the friendship of a half dozen children. The second half sees the girl taken for a "visit" by her aunt to the USA where they remain indefinitely beyond their visit visas, integrating and acculturating.
The large number of horrible events make me feel a little like an atrocity tourist. Despite the jaunty tone, I didn't enjoy the book.
We Need New Names appears (September 2013) on the 2013 Man Booker Prize short list.
The Best American Poetry 2013.
An ok issue this year. Includes a haiku-like series.
Issues previously read:
Brown's style of teasingly withholding information leaves me feeling that the book is actually slow, despite the author's probable belief that it's a clever and speedy adventure. After listening to the first and last of the 14 CDs, I could not face the rest. Not recommended.
All the Gilded Agendas (2013),
poetry
by Blema Wolin, who is a fan of Ashbery's style.
But my favorite of her poems are the more direct and narrative like "Departures" (p.27),
"November Sky" (p. 32),
and
"New Year's Day" (p. 73).
Among the more interesting essays are: Joanna Macy's "Pass It On", Bonnie Myotai Treace's "The Sword Disappears in the Water" (koan study), and Matthieu Ricard's "Why Meditate?".
a primer of organic form (2013)
by Jim Kacian.
His back cover includes:
| Organic form is an oxymoron — form implies a repeatable technique, and organic suggests shape devised for a specific instance. This brief booklet is a primer of how to marry the two together: how to use space to control a verbal experience to achieve a desired result. Organic shape is the last (largely) unexplored means of presenting haiku, and a challenge to the poet as viewer as well as writer. |
Frogpond (36:3, 2013),
excellent
haiku journal.
Includes a haiku by J. Zimmerman
Lectures:
Other Modern Scholar courses:
{ August : hachi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2013 }
(8.31.2013)
Clive James' 2013 translation of Dante's
Paradise
(Book Three of Dante's Comedy).
Dante reaches his goal while still criticising those whom he considers unworthly of reaching his heaven. As I struggled to the end of this translation, it became increasingly clear that this was not the version for me.
A relief to read an eminently readable juvenile fiction and a winner of the Newberry Medal but also a grimmess to see how torture is not limited to Dante's Inferno.
A delightful prose-tanka mixture, one of the earliest.
Masterly tales of the sleuth C. August Dupin:
Clive James' 2013 translation of Dante's
Purgatory
(Book Two of Dante's Comedy).
In this part, Dante still subjects his enemies to carrying back-collapsing loads, having their eyes sewn shut, etc. But all this will only last for many lifetimes, not eternity. So much less horrible than the endless pains of Inferno.
Enthusiastic, well-illustrated. Nordic pole walking is relatively low-impact exercise whose techniques can be quickly learned.
Having a sense of humor/humour honed in a British grammar school, I find this to be the funniest as well as the most geologic and in some ways the most poetic book I have read this year. Simon Armitage was a Geography undergraduate and is now the professor of poetry at the University of Sheffield. I just finished it and I'm still smiling.
Armitage walks it from North to South and (being a poet) finagles lodging, meals, cakes, and Elastoplasts all for doing some measly poetry readings: "256 miles and nineteen consecutive poetry readings stretching away to the south"!
It's full of "oops" situations that somehow seem reminiscent of my schooldays: e.g.:
| And yet, for reasons that I can't explain, I continue to prefer my own judgement over that of the compass or the GPS, both of which are obviously BROKEN and USELESS. [pp.37-38] |
and
| If ever a signpost is needed on the Pennine Way it is at John Track Well ... because it's here that the trail suddenly crosses the stream and sets off at a right angle, bearing due east. Perhaps from the other direction the junction is impossible to miss, but by this approach it is a disaster waiting to happen, and I duly oblige, unable to imagine that such a turning would go unrecognized given the potential consequences of getting lost on Bleaklow. In other words it is not my fault that instead of making a sharp left at the ford I plough on across the moor until the stream fizzles out, and with it the path. [p.272] |
Geology is appreciated as:
| the bedrock which ultimately gives shape, structure and meaning to the territory we walk through. Even as a geography graduate [however] I have to admit that not only have the finer points of geology eluded me, so too have most of its general principles. Either the time periods are too enormous to contemplate, or the processes too convoluted to understand, or the names too long to remember. [p.129] |
and
Still he completes almost all of it in 19 days, giving up on the last day halfway to Edale, overcome by the horrible raining fog on Kinder (an ironic name in the circumstances).
Marvelous - well, it's Issa innit.
Ferry opens with "Sixteenth-century writers and their readers generally shared the view inherited from antiquity that the oration was the single most authoritative model of prose composition, even for a piece of writing not spoken to a public audience but intended for readers". In her "Introduction", Ferry writes: "this book is about some aspects of sixteenth-century English and about some of the ways that poets used it". She comments on the differences from modern writers by sixteenth-century writers, including:
Her chapters are:
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The secret of Rimbaud ... the reason why he was able to do the unique things in literature
which he did, and then to disappear quietly ... is that his mind was not the mind
of the artist but of the man of action.
He was a dreamer but all his dreams were of discoveries.
To him it was an identical act of his temperament to write the sonnet of the
"Vowels" and to trade in ivory and frankincense with the Arabs.
... there are certain natures (great or small, Shakespeare or Rimbaud, it makes no difference), to whom the work is nothing, the act of working is everything. ... his [Rimbaud's] follies and his wanderings and his traffickings were but the breathing of different hours in his day. ... He invented new ways of saying things, not because he is learned artist, but because he is burning to say them, and he has none of the hesitations of knowledge. |
Read Stanford Forrester (editor)'s bottle rockets
15:1 (aka number 29) (2013).
{ July : shichi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2013 }
OK but a bit of a slog in parts The Testament of Mary is lightweight and a somewhat predictable tale of the last days of the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. A similar-but-different story was covered better by Crace in his 1997 Quarantine, in which a Jesus-like person about 30 A.D. does a desert vision quest.
The Testament of Mary appears (July 2013) on the 2013 Man Booker Prize long list (and later on the short list).
Finished listening to
Silken Prey (2013)
by John Sandford
(narrated by Richard Ferrone).
Nice to see Lucas Davenport back on the job. Though the title is a tease and the possible horrors (including being eaten alive by wolf-sized dogs) are muted.
Sandford's books read: Lucas Davenport books:
| Title (alphabetic) | Series ordinal | Year |
| Silken Prey | ? | 2013 |
| Broken Prey | 16th | 2005 |
| Eyes of Prey | 3rd | 1991 |
| Invisible Prey | 17th | 2007 |
| Mind Prey | 7th | 1995 |
| Mortal Prey | 13th | 2002 |
| Naked Prey | 14th | 2003 |
| Night Prey | 6th | 1994 |
| Phantom Prey | 18th | 2008 |
| Rules of Prey | 1st | 1989 |
| Secret Prey | 9th | 1997 |
| Shadow Prey | 2nd | 1990 |
| Sudden Prey | 8th | 1996 |
| Winter Prey | 5th | 1993 |
Virgil Flowers books:
Ok. And nostalgic.
Books by Dexter include:
Read A Five-Balloon Morning (2013),
haiku
and
haibun
by Charles Trumbull,
editor emeritus of
Modern Haiku.
An excellent collection.
Related books:
See also the gorgeous Traces of the Brush: the Art of Japanese Calligraphy by Louise Boudonnat and Harumi Kushizaki.
Pretty good — romps along with an alcoholic detective (Morse), a sympathetic murder victim, a handful of suspects, a barrelful of red herring, and large bosoms of salacious innuendo.
One of the exemplar books recommended in Alexander's course on detective fiction
Frogpond (36:2, 2013),
excellent
haiku journal.
Includes a haiku by J. Zimmerman
Also a positive review of our Wild Violets haiku anthology, which she edited.
An interleaved story of a Japanese girl's (told in her diary) with the story of Ruth, a novelist who finds the girl's diary in barnacle-crusted set of plastic bags washed up as flotsam (or jetsam) on a Canadian shore.
Nominally the Japanese girl (Nao) is 16 though her self-awareness seems that of an older writer.
Interesting interleaving of Japanese and North American cultures and occasional Japanese phrases. Pretty horrendous about bullying in Japanese schools, even if it does come from a fictional character.
A Tale for the Time Being appears (July 2013) on the 2013 Man Booker Prize long list.
Nine essays for the calligraphy exhibition of the same title.
An enormous, beautiful illustrated book, with a list of Recommended Readings, a Glossary of Chinese Terms and Titles, and an Index of Illustrated Artists and Works.
The "Director's Preface" by Jay Xu begins:
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"A person's character, said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, is his fate. In China a
contemporaneous philosopher might have said that a person's character is his character.
Beginning with ancient inscriptions and stele, centuries of educated Chinese have
sought to refine their calligraphy by studying the examples of those who had come
before them. Often they meticulously retrace the strokes of ancient models in the belief
that by refining their calligraphy they would also refine their own character.
Their objective was to create something new by working through the constraints
of tradition, and in so doing to honor and respect that tradition, and also to advance it.
[p. 10] |
Wang Lianqi's "An Examination of Zhao Mengfu's Sutra on the Lotus of the Sublime Dharma (Miaofa lianhua jing in Small Standard Script" includes (p.81) an image from the Thousand Character Classic by Zhao Mengfu in four scripts: standard, cursive, clerical, and seal.
Almost 600 pages of text and b/w photos. A detailed record of the lives of the Chinese who arrived in this area and the racism of most whites at that time.
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"No monuments, no prominent place names, no gilt 'Chinese-style' buildings,
and no large concentrations of Chinese people attest to the Chinese presence in the
Monterey Bay Region. ...
Yet Chinese contributions were fundamental to the region's economic development.
In Watsonville, ... Chinese farm laborers provided the muscle and ingenuity which led
to an agricultural diversification in the Pajaro Valley.
... In Monterey, ... the Chinese founded the commercial fishing industry.
... Santa Cruz became a resort town because the Chinese made the cuts, drilled the tunnels,
and laid the rails which brought trainloads of tourists ...
most of the large development projects undertaken in the region in the nineteenth
century, whether they were railroads, irrigation projects, or major water systems,
relied on Chinese laborers.
[pp. 1-2] |
Presence #48,
the haiku journal.
Includes a haiku by moi and a haibun by moi.
Alexander's awkward presentation (a tense voice, often a straight reading of the very material that is given in the course booklet, a tendency to raise her pitch when a lowered pitch would signal the completion of the thought, some badly edited sections on the CD, etc) cannot entirely hide the interesting and useful information in this course.
The Lectures are:
Four romps:
Helpful to review after reading Clive James' 2013 translation of Dante's Inferno.
Clive James' 2013 translation of Dante's
Inferno
(Book One of his Comedy).
The fourteenth-century equivalent of a modern tell-all revenge book and a block-buster horror film.
A scary and sombre story about the visions of an epileptic boy while he struggles with his place in his family after the death of his mother and his father's remarriage.
A love story, an exploration of the life and emotions of someone who becomes a C4/5 quadriplegic, and a study of motivations for and against assisted suicide. Both inspiring and heart-breaking.
Ribbons
(9, 2) Spring/Summer 2013 issue.
Includes a couple of
Tanka by J. Zimmerman,
part 2 of her essay on her Tanka Revision Workshop,
and
a responsive tanka by her and Peggy Heinrich.
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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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