- NC Tate
02/23/2012
02/18/2012
02/15/2012
Bless!
- NC Tate
Somewhere
- NC Tate
02/13/2012
Azure on grey
A blue flash darting
down the concrete river bank;
Kingfisher at work
--Julian
(Photo: MH)
02/10/2012
Station
- NC Tate
02/07/2012
02/04/2012
Bow Street Garages 7.34, 31.1.12
- NC Tate
02/01/2012
01/30/2012
Floating World
My old friend Jeff has just put out his first CD.
"From raunchy Chicago-style blues boogie, to quirky alt-country, to jazz/reggae/blues torch-tinged soul, with authentic, intelligent, playful songwriting, soulful singing and superb guitar work, and a cast of well known musicians."
Check it out here.
--David
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Books David Finished in 2012
Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Vintage)
The right people do the right thing, the bad guys get their comeuppance, and Salander remains appealing: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is a fine conclusion to the trilogy.Junnosuke Yoshiyuki: Toward Dusk and Other Stories
When the house in which Yoshiyuki Junnosuke grew up burned down, Lawrence Rogers writes, "he fled the flames with only his Debussy records and some fifty poems he had written in a notebook." Given the family in which he was raised, it is no surprise that even as a teenager Junnosuke had already given art pride of place in his life, and that his relation to art bordered on the neurotic. His father, Eisuke Yoshiyuki, for example was a dadaist poet, who, in Donald Richie's account, "gave up on literature and threw away his library, all except the three books he had published." What is surprising is that even a man with as unconventional a background as Junnosuke wrote so many stories driven by a fear of being made to conform. The vehicle that might cause a man such as himself (and he was a writer very much in the tradition of the Japanese I-novel) to conform was sex—sex, that is, which might lead to pregnancy, children, and, therefore, a domestic suburban prison. Most of Junnosuke's tales have to do with sex; none make the act at all attractive. We do, however, with horrified fascination, keep on turning pages.Vikram Seth: Three Chinese Poets
Reading Vikram Seth's translations of Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu shortly after enjoying A.C. Graham's translations of seven T'ang Chinese poets (Du Fu [or Tu Fu] is the only one they have in common) reveals how big a tent translation is. Seth's and Graham's approaches to the poems, both effective, are very different. Graham writes that "almost all Chinese poetry is rhymed, and most classical forms have lines with equal numbers of syllables," and that "the sacrifice of strict form for the sake of content was first made possible by the doctrine that the essence of poetry is the image, the exact presentation of which imposes a rhythm out of accord with regular verse forms." This is more or less fine with Graham, whose translations recall the best of early modernist Imagism. Seth, on the other hand, and this will surprise no one who has read The Golden Gate, does his best to preserve the formal rigor of the Chinese originals. Both translators, according to their different lights, produce poems that read well in English. So intent is Seth on preserving the rhyme and rhythm of the originals, that one occasionally fears he might drift into doggerel, but then one comes across, for example, his version of the Du Fu Autumn meditation in which the poet compares Changan to a chess board. Seth's version is, one finds, not only formally more intricate than Graham's, but the images, too, seem more apt, as when Seth writes "dragons and fish are still," rather than, as Graham would have it, " . . . the dragons and fish fall asleep." This is the only poem the books have in common. They compliment each other in the different treasures they make available, and the different ways in which they present those treasures.Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Played with Fire (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
I liked the way the characters develop in this entry in the series. It seems that now we know all of Salander's secrets, so one wonders what surprises volume three of the Millenium Trilogy holds. The references to Pippi Longstocking (which I missed entirely in volume one) are made explicit here and add an interesting substratum to the surface story. Now, off to download volume three.Poems of the Late T'ang (New York Review Books Classics)
Poems of the Late T'ang is worth the price of admission for A.C. Graham's witty and informative essay, "The Translation of Chinese Poetry," alone. It is, of course, insightful about Chinese poetry, but no less illuminating about modernist European and American poetry, and poetry in general. Concerning the textual apparatus that is a necessary part of a collection such as this one, he writes: "How much of this information can a reader be expected to tolerate? Equally important, how much of it will do him any good? There is more literary allusion in early twentieth century English than in T'ang poetry; we can read Eliot with excitement although missing most of his references, and when we look one up often find that it enriches the response disappointingly little." Aware of the limitations of such notes and explanations Graham strikes just the right balance. He does supply notes, and sometimes paraphrases for some (but not all) of the poems, and those he includes are uniformly helpful: they never enrich the response "disappointingly little." Of course, however, the point of this book is the poems, and in the work he has chosen, from seven different poets, Graham shows us how rich and varied the writing of the late T'ang poets was. As with a group of any seven poets, the work of some will be more to one's taste than others, but all the work collected here is worth reading, and much of it worth reading again and again.
Books Julian Read Recently
John Gray: Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Straw Dogs by John Gray. I first read this book of philosophy in 2002 and it was even more powerful and helpful this time around. Gray convinces me that the whirlwind of human action, and our attempts to make the world a better place are ways to try and deny our mortality. He suggests, rather, a life of contemplation and seeing, which is what I now aspire to. My book of the year. (*****)Alison Light: Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants is the rarest of books because even the most liberal of the British upper and middle classes are born into seeing the lower classes as lesser human beings. Author Alison Light manages to grant the servant class their full humanity, which, for this middle class British reader, was eye-opening and moving. Light finds enough evidence, often through resistant reading of upper and middle class reports, to give Bloomsbury’s army of servants full biographies. The by-product is something equally rare: fresh insights into Virginia and Leonard and Bloomsbury. (****)Catherine Hakim: Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital
Honey Money is clearly written, if repetitive, and is bracing in its truth telling. It spells out the extent to which sex drives men. Males never get enough, but manage to organize life so that women don’t realize that they hold all the cards. And feminism has unwittingly gone along with this. Our physical and social attractiveness—what Hakim calls erotic capital—is as valuable and as worth enhancing as our other assets. The book makes use of gay male studies as a way to isolate and shed light on male drives regardless of orientation. And after reanalyzing surveys, it asserts that gays account for 1 to 2% of the population rather than the commonly understood 10%. (****)
Films Julian Watched Recently
- Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
[Brutal thrills plus humor] I like an adrenaline rush (from the comfort and safety of my cinema seat) as much as anyone, and this is delicious set piece after set piece. But when the characters are in peril, or are knocking each other senseless, I can't watch which sort of defeats the purpose. And much of the humor irritated me. But the credit sequence did rock. It's semi-abstract and acts as a preview of the thrills to come. Outstanding. Unfortunately there was another two hours plus to endure. (*) - Source Code
[Groundhog Day meets The Matrix] Source Code is an well-acted, well-made, ingenious thriller that sagged a bit in the middle. It’s an example of Americans thrilling/scaring themselves with tales of terrorism. And how we want to believe our universe has a creator, a meaning and a purpose. (Theater, November, 2011) (***) - Hanna
[Misfire] Hanna, Joe Wright's Chemical Brothers scored thriller, mixes ridiculous action sequences with a ton of comedy for a whole that doesn’t gel. (M gave it one star; Theater, November 10, 2011) (**) - The Tree of Life
[Great Malick] This movie is way left field: I sat there feeling it as much as trying to understand it. It’s a hybrid coming of age tale and metaphysical speculation, and that’s probably why it’s too long. The nature shots look terrific, and that look is the key to the metaphysical resolution. [Ebert sees the coda as an "afterlife" but I prefer my filmgoing companion's interpretation that it is the main character's "memory life."] (Theater, August 17, 2011) (****) - The American
[Handsome and empty] This stately story of an American (good role for Clooney) in Italy seemed to be about the life-and-death issue of trust. Not being in the assassination business myself, that isn't a hot-button topic for me, so I found nothing that resonated in my own life. But I have to confess I misunderstood a crucial final twist ("What? He knew about that all along? Wow!"), so I’m probably not the best person to be talking about this. (M gave it 0 stars; Theater, July 10, 2011). (**)
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