Books read recently by J. Zimmerman

Disclaimer. Links. Booker Prizes. Chocolate. Books read. Best books read in 2015. Best book read in 2014: Hannah Kent's Burial Rites: a Novel (2013), her first: a historical fiction set in Iceland. Gripping and brilliant, it's set in the early nineteenth century, in rural Iceland, where a woman accused of murder is temporarily housed at a farm as a servant. Kent's plot, characters, and writing are all powerful and memorable. Her structure is especially excellent, interleaving historical documents and events with her invented scenes and actions and conversations. Blog entry. Best writers of poetry and prose Harry Potter; also Harry Potter en Español. Why read a book?. New books on Spirituality by Pagels, Ehrman, et al.

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

Part of the pleasure of knowing Latin is that you don't have to learn to say, "Where is the cathedral" or "I would like a return ticket, second class, please." You actually get to the literature. You don't have to be always making yourself understood. Mary Beard, as quoted by Rebecca Mead in her New Yorker (September 1, 2014) article "The Troll Slayer: A Cambridge classicist takes on her sexist detractors".

{ March : san-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2015 }

(3.28.2015)

• Mitsu Suzuki's 1992 Temple dusk : Zen haiku.

  A collection of 164 haiku written 1970 to 1991, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Gregory A. Wood. Their introduction gives her beginnings in Japan and her work in the USA particularly with the San Francisco Zen Center, where her husband was Abbot from 1959 till his death in 1971.

  Haiku mind soaking through red grass Autumn 1978. San Francisco. Mizu shimiru gotoku kugokoro kusamomiji [p. 66]

  Summer chill something I didn't ask Mother about Father Summer 1987. San Francisco. Natsuzamu ya haha ni kikazaru chichi no koto [p. 153]

• Haruki Murakami's 2008 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: a memoir.

  A lightweight quick read, full of the joys and horrors of training for and running in marathons, as well as one ultramarathon (a 100K in Hokkaido) and several triathlons. Murakami says: 'Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.'

  Also, which says something about his obsessional qualities in marathoning: 'Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.'

  Also:

  I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise I'd never know what running means to me. [p. vi]

  . . . writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't seek validation in the outer visible world. [p. 10]

  I'm the kind of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. . . . I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. [p. 15]

  Books by Haruki Murakami:

  • 2011: 1Q84. Some amazing metaphors; terrible plot; yucky romanticization of incest.
  • 2008: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: a Memoir. Good.
  • After the Quake: Stories. OK.
  • A Wild Sheep Chase. Poor, bloated.

• Simon Garfield's 2010 Just My Type: a book about fonts.

  Very informative. Chapter 12 is particularly cool on the unforgiving path of identifying unknown fonts at MyFonts.com:

  The contributors here, who go under such names as listlessBean and Eyehawk, display vast knowledge, an eagerness to help, and inestimable amounts of bile. [p. 176]

  As well as advice in the font department, it also has some words to the unaware in the email department:

  On 25 September 2007, a woman named Vicki Walker committed a type of crime so calamitous that it cost her not only her job but almost her sanity . . . there was an email to send. Regrettably, she ignored the only rule that anyone who has ever emailed knows: CAPITAL LETTERS LOOK LIKE YOU HATE SOMEONE AND ARE SHOUTING. . . . Vicki Walker was sacked three months after her email was deemed to have caused 'disharmony in the workplace'. [pp. 23-24]

  Other factoids include speed-reading from a moving vehicle:

  Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert . . . established that it is a lot easier to read lower-case letters than capitals when travelling at speed. [p. 143]

• Sampled Cathy Park Hong's (2007) Dance Dance Revolution, poems which is written in a sort of creole language invented by CPH for the purpose, so it's sort of language poetry and sort of trying to break in on a conversation between twins in a private language they've invented..

  Adrienne Rich chose this (Hong's second book) as the winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize.

  I dipped randomly into it. It's a startling extremism of language poetry (CPH invents her own polyglot language for most of the poems). Then I read her introduction which (theoretically) explains all. The book's sections each end in the "normal regular English" of a different narrator: so I then read each of those — those poems I liked. The others (the polyglots) were too much work for this reader, so a sampling was all it got. Not recommended.

• Finished listening to Gail Tsukiyama's (2007) The street of a thousand blossoms, narrated by Stephen Park.
  Two orphaned brothers raised in World War Two Japan by grandparents aspire to a future rooted in tradition. Hiroshi (the older brother) trains as a sumo wrestler, while Kenji learns to create masks for Noh theater actors. In another family, two motherless girls are beginning to define their own lives.

• Interesting that Fanny Howe (a poet!!!) is on this year's Man-Booker International Prize long-list. Announcement of the Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 includes a poet (well, she also does write essays and novels): Fanny Howe, who has also appeared in a few of the annual issues of The Best American Poetry.

  Since 1990, her work has appeared in:

  • The Best American Poetry 2001 (Guest Editor Robert Hass), with "Doubt", a four-page poem that starts with a prosy stanzas:

    Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off till then. Edith Stein, recently and controversially beatified by the Pope, who had successfully worked to transform and existential vocabulary into a theological one, was taken to Auschwitz in August, 1942.

    And it ends:

    After all, can you call "doubt" "bewilderment" and suddenly be relieved? Not if your mind has been fatally poisoned. . . . But even then, it seems, the dream of having no doubt continues, finding its way into love and work. After all, choices matter exactly as much as they don't matter — especially when history is on your side.

    The deliciousness of that series is as much the poets' comments on their poems as the poems themselves. For "Doubt", Howe comments:

    "Doubt", was written for a conference on Simone Weil two years ago at Columbia University. I ended up reading poems instead because the atmosphere was contentious. . . . Originally I thought of this as a lyrical essay, but increasingly all my writing tends toward poetry, including my recent novel, Indivisible. I can no longer make distinctions among the genres. This must have developed naturally over time, though I think it always created a problem for my prose, which might have had a happier life if I have called it poetry.

  • The Best American Poetry 2002 (Guest Editor Robert Creeley), with "9-11-01", a one-page poem that starts:

    The first person is an existentialist Like trash in the groin of the sand dunes Like a brown cardboard box home beside a dam

    And it ends:

    The third person is a materialist.

    For "9-11-01", Howe comments:

    This poem was drawn from notes and an earlier poem written during the Gulf War, when I lived in San Diego, and watched the military planes flying out from the Miramar Air Force Base to the Pacific. The sense of there being no difference between one desert and another, given the magnitude of attacks by air, was revived by the events of September 11, 2001, as was the end game of strict materialism.

  • The Best American Poetry 2004 (Guest Editor Lyn Hejinian), with "Catholic", a 13-page (!!) 37-numbered-sections poem that starts:

    What can you do after Easter? Every turn of the tire is a still point on the freeway. If you stand in one, and notice what is around you, it is a pile-up of the permanent.

    And it ends:

    That is why I keep moving and only stop for the eucharist in a church where there are sick, vomiting, maimed, screaming, destroyed, violent, useless, happy, pious, fraudulent, hypocritical lying, thieving, hating, drunk, rich, poverty-stricken people.

    For "Catholic", Howe comments:

    "Catholic" is an effort at understanding Aquinas in contemporary terms, something that leads me in many directions, most of them surprising.

  The prize is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is widely available in translation in the English language. The 2015 potential winners are:

  1. César Aira (Argentina)
  2. Hoda Barakat (Lebanon)
  3. Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe)
  4. Mia Couto (Mozambique)
  5. Amitav Ghosh (India)
  6. Fanny Howe (United States of America)
  7. Ibrahim al-Koni (Libya)
  8. László Krasznahorkai (Hungary)
  9. Alain Mabanckou (Republic of Congo)
  10. Marlene van Niekerk (South Africa)

• Rachel Cusk's 2006 Arlington Park.

  Disappointing after enjoying so much her recent Outline.

  Arlington Park is in the same style (multiple short stories that connect into a book) as Outline, but it's not as good:

  1. Doesn't have the through line of a clear protagonist.
  2. It's full of married women with babies, toddlers, & school kids; all the women seem to be horrified (to varying degrees) to find themselves (a) married and (b) with kids. Too much grumbling. You don't see much of the husbands but when you do they seem a little out-of-sync with the women's claims — in some ways wonderful (thereby undermining some of the women's complaints) and in some ways terrible (e.g. appallingly racist) though not always in the ways that the wives complained about them.

• Completed Kaneko Tohta's Selected Haiku: Part 1: 1937-1960 translated from the Japanese by The Kon Nichi Translation Group (led by Richard Gilbert and associated with Kumamoto University). Includes one article commentary by Richard Gilbert and one by Itou Yuuki.

  The book was one of four recipients of the Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards 2012. Tohta seems quite opinionated about haiku and to be exploring its boundaries; this has led to strong opinions (pro and con) being expressed about his work and about that award. I am a greater fan of the poems by Momoko Kuroda but Kaneko Tohta has some good haiku such as:

  misted train windows pass through Hiroshima — a woman's cry

  However, many of his gendai haiku leave me wondering what is the Japanese for "huh?" e.g.:

  a doctor after surgery becomes a swan hills of night

• Read issue 46.1 (Winter/Spring 2014) of Modern Haiku.

  Includes two haiku by moi.

  Also includes my review of Momoko Kuroda's haiku I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda (2014), selected and translated by Abigail Friedman. A slightly modified version of my essay is on-line.

• 2000: Friends in High Places (a Donna Leon 'Brunetti' novel).

  A young man investigating missing official approval for construction of Brunetti's apartment some years before dies after falling from a scaffold ...

• 1992: Death at La Fenice (a Donna Leon 'Brunetti' novel).

  An opera conductor is found dead in the intermission of an opera he was conducting ...

• Robert Hass' 1989 poetry collection Human Wishes.

  Section 1 of amazingly long-line and long-sentence poems. Section 2 of prose poems. Sections 3 and 4 are longish poems but with more traditional line lengths. Section 3 includes the seven-page "Berkeley Eclogue".

• Diane J. Raynor's 2014 Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works.

• Jerry Ball's Spring 1997 When (Almost) Nothing Happens: Haiku with Very Few Verbs, The Haiku Foundation Digital Library, accessed March 15, 2015. Ball has long been an enthusiast for haiku that preference being over doing.

• New Yorker (March 16, 2015), especially the article "Girl, Interrupted: Who was Sappho" by Daniel Mendelsohn, in response to Diane J. Raynor's recent Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works.

• Finished listening to Dan Jones' (2014) The Plantagenets: the Warrior Kings and Queens who Made England, narrated by Clive Chafer.
  The astonishing militancy of the English Plantagenet monarchs fighting their French cousins and their British brethren leaves one relieved we live many centuries later.

• Renée Owen's 2014 Alone on a Wild Coast, an excellent Snapshot Press collection of her haibun and haiku.

• Finished listening to Peter Carey's (2014) Amnesia. narrated by Colin McPhillamy.

  A delightful cyber-hacking tale of ecoactivists. Lots of twists, turns, and somersaults.

  Very educational, also, about the USA undercover intervention in Australian politics, engineering the 1975 manipulation of Australian leadership, through the ousting of Gough Whitlam, Australia's elected Labor Party Prime Minister. As Carey writes: "We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and allies. ... We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot about it right away." Yes, amnesia.

  And lots of good writing also.

• 1999: Fatal Remedies (a Donna Leon 'Brunetti' novel).

  Brunetti's wife vandalizes a business and comes under suspicion for a murder.

• Dana Levin's 2011 Sky Burial (poems).

  Her "Judd Boxes" poem has this glorious quote:

  "sometimes, like they were made out of water sometimes, like they were made out of light boxes with their sides disappearing"

  Levin's style seems a little like those stacked Judd boxes at Marfa.

• Dana Levin's 2005 Wedding Day (poems).

  This includes two "Ars Poetica" poems, which help the reader understand the poet's often obscure intents. One such poem is:

  Ars Poetica The idea, the teacher said, was that there was chaos left in matter — a little bit of not-yet in everything that was — so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions — the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid — was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope, leaving things unfinished? as if in completing a sentence there was death —

  I am less enthusiastic of her poems that are primarily samplings of other people's prose writings, but it's a post-modernists trope.

  Post-modern techniques (many are found in her work) can include:

  • Black humor
  • Fabulation: uses non-traditional structures of a novel or role of the narrator; includes elements of fantasy. Magical realism (the surreal) could be a subset.
  • Fragmentation: interrupted events and/or syntax (this is a foreground technique in Levin); interspersed references and quotations. Sometimes called: Formlessness.
  • Groundlessness: images with no reference beyond themselves; lack of a preferred interpretation.
  • Iconoclasm: denies authority (of cultural standards, the author, previous texts, etc).
  • Intertextuality: the relationship between a text and others in literary history. (The Japanese anticipated this strategy three centuries ago with their intertextuality in haiku.)
  • Ironic quote marks signifying tongue-in-cheek.
  • Maximalism: relentless bulk and detail.
  • Metafiction (writing about writing, which poets have done long before the transient fashion of postmodernism). Can include Poioumenon (pl. poioumena; from Ancient Greek: "product"), metafiction about the process of creation.
  • Minimalism: economy of words, representing the basics; the reader has great freedom in interpreting the story.
  • Pastiche (pasting multiple elements together: the Japanese anticipated this strategy centuries ago with haiga, combining poetry and painting, and both haibun and tanka prose, combining prose and poetry). Populism can be a subset, employing material from popular culture not just from an educated upper- or middle-class.
  • Technoculture, especially information bombardment of late capitalism.
  • Temporal distortion, including anachronism, non-linearity, bifurcation, etc.

• 1997: A Noble Radiance (a Donna Leon 'Brunetti' novel).

  Brunetti revisits a cold case of a kidnapping and disappearance of a son of an old and aristocratic families.

• Rattle (Spring 2015).

  Special edition on Japanese poetry forms including:

  • Haibun
  • Haiga
  • Haiku
  • Rengay
  • Renku
  • Tanka

  and an interview with Richard Gilbert.

  A podcast of the KUSP Poetry Show (March 29, 2015) where I discussion of this issue of Rattle is at the KUSP site.

• Frogpond (38:1, 2015), excellent haiku journal.

  Includes two haiku by J. Zimmerman

  Lee Gurga's 18-page essay addresses "Newku for Old: Haiku 21 and Haiku 2014 as Guides to the Experimental and the Traditional in Haiku".

  Michele Root-Bernstein's 13-page interview: "Beautiful Dance: A Conversation with Eve Luckring About Video Art and Haiku".

{ February : ni-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2015 }

(2.20.2015)

• 1994: The Anonymous Venetian aka 'Dressed for Death' (a Donna Leon 'Brunetti' novel).

  Brunetti's tries to take a family holiday but a badly beaten body (face unrecognizable) alters his plans.

• 1997: A Venetian Reckoning aka 'Death and Judgment' aka 'Vendetta' (a Donna Leon 'Brunetti' novel).

  Brunetti, as will become a pattern, investigates illicit sex and Italy's rich and powerful.

• Rachel Cusk's 2014 Outline.

  It's a brilliant presentation of how we become more clear about who we are through our interactions with other people, often people we meet transiently. It's a novel but she is also a memoirist and it feels like a blend between the genres. It's my best book of 2015 so far, at least based on how I imbibed in within 24 hours! It reminded me of Nicholson Baker's novel Traveling Sprinkler (2013) though its protagonist is not as hapless; and its subtext is on writing prose rather than poetry.

  I ... was going to Athens for a couple of days to teach a course at a summer school there. The course was entitled 'How to Write': a number of different writers were teaching it, and since there was no one way to write I supposed we would give the students contradictory advice. ... They could write in whatever language they wanted: it made no difference to me. [p. 18]

  I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition — I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything. [p. 19]

  It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn't know. But what other people thought was no longer any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures. [p. 70]

  [A]s a playwright she knew that the problem with incidents is that everything gets blamed on them: they become a premise towards which everything else is drawn, as though seeking an explanation of itself. It might be that this — problem would have occurred anyway. ... "I call it summing up," she said with a cheerful squawk. Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she got very far she would find herself summing it up. Often it took only one word: tension, for instance, or mother-in-law, though strictly speaking that was three. As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it. Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up? And it wasn't only her own work — she found herself doing it to other people's, and had discovered that even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. ... And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people — she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over. ... [I]t had invaded her inner world to the extent that she herself felt summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when Anne's life just about covered it. [pp. 232-233]

  The longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident [a mugging] a sense of who she now was. [p. 239]

  ... I waited for him to ask me a question, which after all would have been only polite, but he didn't, even though I had asked him so many questions about himself. He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew that view to be under threat. ... Yet if people were silent about the things that happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them? It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn't be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all, when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. [p. 245]

• Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night. Another ripping yarn featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, when true love conquers.

• Dorothy L. Sayers' Have His Carcase. Another ripping yarn featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

• Dorothy L. Sayers' Strong Poison. A ripping yarn in which Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane meet.

• Abandond into Emma Healey's (2014) Elizabeth is Missing.

  An elderly woman with memory loss: too slow, too sad, too close to home.

• Dipped into Norman Colquhoun's (1953) Paint Your Own Pictures.

  There are people who meet any challenge to a new activity by saying that they do not like to attempt anything unless they can do it well. They set before themselves a rigid standard of perfection. They like to shine at everything they do, and would rather not venture into a new field than risk failure in it. Such an attitude easily becomes a hindrance. It presents another aspect of fear, of holding back; and a person who on this account refuses to take a risk in an unknown activity is merely allowing reasonable caution to become a stumbling block. [p. 17]

• Peter M. Wayne's (2013) The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi: 12 Weeks to a Healthy Body, Strong Heart, and Sharp Mind.

  Sections:

  1. The Ancient Promise of, and Modern Need for, Tai Chi. Tai Chi embodies "the philosophical concept of the all-encompassing yin-yang principle, often translated as Supreme (great or large] Ultimate [a superlative]. Chuan generally is translated as 'fist' or 'boxing'" (p. 14).
     "'Qi' refers to vital energy, information, breath, or spirit ... Broadly speaking, Qigong translates as the culmination or mastery of Qi" (p.15). While Tai Chi developed in the 1700s, references to "health-promoting exercises based on the movement of animals" appear in a Chinese document from four thousand years ago (p. 20).
  2. The Eight Active Ingredients of Tai Chi.
     1. Awareness.
     2. Intention (including belief and expectation).
     3. Structured integration and biomechanical efficiency.
     4. Active relaxation.
     5. Strengthening and flexibility.
     6. Natural, freer breathing.
     7. Social support (Tai Chi in a group).
     8. Embodied spirituality.
  3. Put the Principles into Practice: A Simplified Tai Chi program.
  4. Improving Your Balance and Bones.
  5. Ease Your Aches and Pains.
  6. Strengthen Your Heart.
  7. Sharpen Your Mind.
  8. Enhance Psychological Well-Being and Sleep Quality.
  9. Tai Chi for Two.
  10. Cross-Train with Tai Chi.
  11. On-the-Job Tai Chi. This includes (p.248-249):
      • A few minutes every couple of hours: "Spinal Cord Breathing, Hand Tai Chi, Neck and Shoulder Stretches, and Foot and Ankle Stretches."
      • "A few minutes of Tai Chi Swinging and Drumming, followed by Washing Yourself with Qi from the Heavens. The Tai Chi Swinging and Drumming will get blood and Qi moving, and Washing Yourself with Qi will help balance and ground you."
  12. Enhance Your Creativity with Tai Chi.
  13. Lifelong Learning with Tai Chi. "The simple protocol in this book allows you to focus on the key active ingredients of Tai Chi, not on the Choreography of a long Tai Chi form" (p. 262-263). As such, it's more like Qi Gong (or "Chi Kung" in the Pinyin phonetic system), which is the great grandmother of Tai Chi (or as others write it, T'ai-chi Ch'uan; or "taiji" in the Pinyin phonetic system).

  The Afterword is "Tai Chi and Twenty-First-Century Medicine ".

• Finished listening to Elizabeth Kolbert's (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. narrated by Anne Twomey.

  The author presents, in her usual clear prose, five previous mass extinctions and the one that we are currently in. Her lucid mixture of geology, genetics, biology, field trips (she takes their physical hardships in stride and is resourceful in adversity), and conversations with research scientists convince all but the irrational that human actions created the current "anthropocene" era of extinctions, which will lead to a loss by the end of the 21st century of between 20% to 50% of all species living on earth.

  The trail of extinction (including not only mammoths but also the Neanderthal and other near-relatives of humans) has long been correlated with the arrival of humans in Europe, Asia, Australia, and so on. This book consolidates the data clearly and convincingly. Human-caused species extinction is faster now than in the past, but it began over a hundred thousand years ago. The claim that we are in the "anthropocene" is justifiable particularly because the fossil record has already written the effect of humans in stone. She seems dubious about solutions. "In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness loses its meaning."

• Héctor Tobar's (2014) Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set them Free.

  In 2010, 33 miners were trapped over two thousand vertical feet down a mine for 69 days with tainted water to drink and little food. What trapped them was a "single block of diorite, as tall as a forty-five building, ... broken off from the rest of the mountain and ... falling thought the layers of the mine knocking out entire sections of the Ramp [the 5-mile coiling road for equipment and men] and causing a chain reaction as the mountain above it collapses". The rock weighs about 770,000 tons.

  Tobar documents the men, their families (who came to hold vigil outside the mine, to initiate and complete the rescue effort) and their behavior under pressure. All the miners were interviewed for this book, which describes not only their behavior while trapped (who provided various kinds of positive leadership, who selfishly raided the cache of limited food that was supposed to be shared amongst them all indefinitely, who improvised alternative lighting, and so on) but also their lives afterward (which largely reflect how they had behaved under pressure).

  The average human requires about 120 grams of glucose each day to survive. The thirty-three trapped men are ingesting, on average, less than one twentieth that amount. During a man's first twenty-four hours without steady food, his body produces glucose from the glycogen stored in the liver. After two or three days the body begins to burn the fat stored in the chest and abdomen, and around his kidneys and many other places. His central nervous system cannot survive on such fats, however. Instead, his brain is fed the acids, or ketone bodies, produced by his liver as it processes his body fat. When his body's fat reserves are exhausted, the protein in his body — muscle, primarily — becomes his brain's chief source of energy. The body's protein is gradually broken down into amino acids that the liver can convert to glucose. In effect, a man's brain begins to eat his muscles to survive: This is the moment when starvation begins. [p. 141]

  Víctor Zamora was "the man who led the attack on the food the first night they were trapped" (p. 190). Unsurprisingly, this is the only man reported as mooching off his fellow miners after the rescue (p. 288).

• American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr.

  Ten female poets that enjoy the skirmishes on the poetry frontier between sense and language poetry:

  • Armantrout, Rae.
  • Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei.
  • Brock-Broido, Lucie.
  • Graham, Jorie.
  • Guest, Barbara.
  • Hejinian, Lyn.
  • Hillman, Brenda.
  • Howe, Susan.
  • Lauterbach, Ann.
  • Mullen, Harryette.

  Juliana Spahr's "Introduction" begins: "what is most provocative about the poems and the essays included here is their revisioning of the lyric tradition". For me the poems seem to try hard to be clever, but mostly fall flat. A strong exception is Harryette Mullen, whose sampled prose poems include the delightful "Sleeping with the Dictionary". Her poems are witty without becoming so self-enamored as to leave the reader out of the relationship.

  After the few pages of poems, each poet makes her own poetic statement, typically two or three pages: these are often very interesting in presenting each poet's view of her aims.

  Each such statement is followed by an essay of a couple of dozen academic-style (jargon, footnotes) pages by a (usually male) commentator. I could have done with less space devoted to those essays and more to the primary text: the poems.

• Finished listening to Naoki Higashida's (2007, translated 2013) The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-year-old Boy with Autism, well narrated by Tom Picasso. The translators are K.A. Yoshida and David Mitchell; the latter also wrote the Introduction.

  The book's author is a Japanese boy (b. 1992).

  The book, told in terms of question-and-answer, is a rewarding look into the experiences of a person with autism, e.g. Higashida says that when he has the "melt down" (so common to people with autism), he feels like he is having a panic attack. He also talks about how disconnected he feels from his body, how easily distracted he is, how meaningful details are to him, etc etc.

  One question that struck a nerve was "Do you dislike long sentences?" (The typical Japanese sentence in the junior-high history book that I have goes on for many lines; some take up a quarter page.) He says it's not that he dislikes them; it's just that he forgets what they are about and loses interest in them. Me too!

{ January : ichi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2015 }

(1.31.2015)

• Reneé Owens' (2014) Alone on a Wild Coast. Haiku and haibun,

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013) edited by Gardner Dozois.

  More than 300,000 words, according to the cover. I dipped in to only about 10% of them, but they were pretty good. Some take a familiar story (often by Connan Doyle or H.G. Wells) and retell it in a world built by the author. On the whole those are more novel and interesting than an unfamiliar story in a familiar world. Occasionally and rarely, we get the best of both.

• red lights: January 2015 issue. Includes a five-tanka sequence, "Dark Energy" of tanka by J. Zimmerman.

  Editor Marilyn Hazelton offers an interesting and helpful discussion of tan-renga and rengay, though I would have liked more examples and specifics.

• Finished listening to Dan Jones' (2014) The Wars of the Roses: the Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors, well narrated by John Curless.
  Scary decades of English civil war despite their graceful title of 'The Wars of the Roses'. The author does well to clarify who were involved and what they were like and how they worked for and against each other, and which different families came to the throne, culminating in the Tudor dynasty.

• Bill Douglas' (2002) The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi and Qigong. A little padded: takes a third of the book before you see some action.

• H.C. Armstrong's (1937) Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal, An Intimate Study of a Dictator, the 20th-century dictator and modernizer of Turkey.

  By a Bill passed in a night through the Assembly, Mustafa Kemal closed the monasteries, dissolved their organisations, turned the dervishes into the streets to be ordinary citizens who must work or starve, and confiscated their wealth to the State. [p. 249]

  Mustafa Kemal . . . called the language professors to him and together they worked out an alphabet in Latin characters to suit the needs of Turkey. For many hours each day Mustafa Kemal practised until he had become proficient. . . . he described the difficulties and disadvantages of the Arabic script, the advantages of the Latin. [p. 264]

  For four hundred years the priests had forbidden all delineation of the human form. He ordered statues of himself to be set up. [p. 267]

• 'Yank' Levy's (1941) Guerrilla Warfare, the 20th-century dictator and modernizer of Turkey.

  guerrilla warfare is not directed against other guerrillas, but against regulars. [p. 11]

  Lawrence [of Arabia] pointed out the 'most wars are wars of contact, both forces striving to keep in touch to avoid tactical surprise. Our war should be a war of detachment . . . not disclosing ourselves until the moment of attack.' This is the essence of guerrilla tactics. [p. 23]

  Caution . . . Invisibility . . . Surprise . . . Initiative. [p. 40]

• Finished listening to Karen Joy Fowler's (2013) We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, narrated by the author.
  It's an amusing ride. Unfortunately, but the intersperse animal-rights lectures are heavy-handed; they may be the opinions of the protagonist, Rosemary Cooke, but their presentation is clumsily didactic, as if we have moved out of a novel and into a lecture theatre. This jars with the rest of Rosemary's presented personality, and feels like a propaganda trick.

  A 2014 Booker Prize shortlist nominee.

• Finished dipping into Mary Beard's (2012) Confronting the classics : traditions, adventures, and innovations.

  A feisty collection of opinionated book reviews (previously published between 1990 and 2012 in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, & elsewhere; informative and fun.

• Abandoned Salman Rushdie's (1988) The Satanic Verses.

  It has some humor but no character that I empathize with or want to learn more about. Perhaps its popularity is due more to political events than to much literary merit.

• Eowyn Ivey's (2012) The Snow Child: A Novel, a revisualization of a story of a child built of snow who comes alive and lives for a while with the old couple that makes them. Set in the 1920's homesteading times in Alaska. Sweet story.

• Erik Larson's (2003) Devil of the White City, a book about Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition and the associated "Dr. Holmes" murders.

• Vikram Chandra's (2014) Geek sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty.

  Good in parts but seems more like a collection of disparate essays jammed together than a unified whole.

  Topics include: (Asian) Indian metaphysics and aesthetics; the grammar of classical Sanskrit Chandra's creative writing (including teasers for some of his plots); digital logic; object oriented programming. The through-path of the book tends toward the blob of mud that Chandra disdains rather than the well structured code that he praises.

  Other grumbles: His two-step process to find out what his references are proved inelegant and user-unfriendly to me. He omits an index, which I could have found very helpful: perhaps he wanted to avoid the semblance of GOTO-equivalents, but he already had such by his use of footnotes.

  I like the idea of the book, but its implementation is weak. Not recommended.

• Listened to W is for Wasted (2013) by Sue Grafton.
  Actually read it myself instead of the usual book-on-CD; a good reliable read.

  Books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
  1982: A is for Alibi .
  1985: B is for Burglar.
  1986: C is for Corpse.
  1987: D is for Deadbeat.
  1988: E is for Evidence.
  1989: F is for Fugitive: also a favorite.
  1992: I is for Innocent.
  1994: K is for Killer.
  1995: L is for Lawless.
  1996: M is for Malice.
  1998: N is for Noose.
  1999: O is for Outlaw.
  2001: P is for Peril.
  2003: Q is for Quarry.
  2004: R is for Ricochet.
  2005: S is for Silence, my favorite in the series so far, perhaps because of the liveliness of the characters.
  2007: T is for Trespass, one of her scariest books yet; becomes riveting.
  2009: U is for Undertow, a very satisfying book.
  2011: V is for Vengeance, very good.
  2013: W is for Wasted, very good: more cousins appear; drug trial shenanigans.
  2013: Kinsey and Me.

• Robert Bly's (2005) My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, poetry collection of 48 poems, each of 6 3-line stanzas.

  Bly calls the form a ghazal. In true Bly fashion, he often includes his name in the final stanza of each poem. However he uses the end-of-line phrase repetition of the traditional ghazal in fewer than 10% of these poems.

  While each stanza does work independently (as in the ghazal) that independence is also true of the rengay, which is also a 6-stanza form!

• Finished revisiting (in preparation for releasing a box of books) Jeanette Winterson's 1987 The Passion.

  Passionate!

  "Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value. . . . I am telling you stories. Trust me!"

  Books I've read by Jeannette Winterson include:
  2004: Lighthousekeeping.
  1992: Written on the Body.
  1989: Sexing the Cherry.
  1987: The Passion.
  1985: Oranges are not the only Fruit.

• The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work: 1st Series (1958) edited and with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley.

  Fascinating to read interviews with 16 authors including E.M. Forster, Dorothy Parker, Georges Simenon, and Françoise Segan, who gives one of the best-ever responses to an interviewer: "Well, that's a pretty disagreeable question, isn't it?", which was in response to "To what extent do you recognize your limits and maintain a check on your ambitions?". She continued: "I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoi and Dostoevski and Shakespeare. That's the best answer, I think."

  Also she says: "Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the 'real' as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called 'realist' novels — they're nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all.

  Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."

• Norton Juster's (1961) The Phantom Toll Booth, with illustrations by Jules Pfeiffer.

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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