Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I've not been keeping up with the recording of my reading that I wish to remember. So here is a very partial accounting of the books read in the period from July to now: 1. Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary edited by Makoto Ueda -invaluable 2. Walden by Haiku by Ian Marshall -interesting project of extracting haiku from Thoreau's prose, but finally unconvincing 3.  Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction by J. Keith Vincent -subtle and persuasive study of how the Japanese texts betray both the feudal past and the longed-for modernity. Insightful analysis of Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and its critical reception. 4. Kokoro by Natsume Soseki - a most subtle tripartite structure: like a haiku? 5. Botchan by Natsume Soseki -witty, a light work 6. State of War by Ninotchka Rosca -too much exposition but memorable characters. 7. After You by Cyril Wong -he does survival in different voices 8. Map: C...

Nut-brown squirrel quotation of the day cost quotation

Two last leaves we were awake and then we drifted off

Watched this Athol Fugard play last night with my XI's at the Signature Theater. A powerful play and a powerful production, directed by the playwright himself. Set in a tea room in the provincial South African town of Port Elizabeth in 1950, the presentation modulated subtly throughout until it closed in a painful act of disavowal. Hard-hitting performances by Leon Addison Brown (Sam), Sahr Ngaujah (Willie), and Noah Robbins (Hally).

JH's memorial was held last Saturday, November 12, at 150w83. PB managed to get through his speech without breaking down. It was a fine speech, loving, modest, and gently humorous. "Jin loved me but he also loved Anderson Cooper and Brazilian ballet dancer Thiago Soares." JH's mom spoke of JH's hospitalization in Fukuoka and PB's care for him in his last days. She too was puzzled by JH's sudden death and speculated that it was due to radiation as JH volunteered at the Fukushima prefecture in the last two or three years he visited Japan. In his speech JH's brother asked himself why JH moved to NYC, and thought it was because the city gave JH the freedom to be himself, freedom he could not find in Japan. He ended by asking us to keep NYC free, to which call many in the audience stood up and applauded. I could not help relating this to the election of Trump. The moment made a deep impression on me. I am committed to New York City and do not intend to leav...

A brown dog mounting a black dog an empty parking lot

Watched last night the terrific move The Dinner (2014), based on a novel by Herman Koch. Directed by Ivano de Matteo, the movie demonstrated, almost inexorably, the fragile foundations of our morality. Great acting from an all-star Italian cast: Alessandro Gassman, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Luigi Lo Cascio, and Barbora Bobulova.

After the flower pots the truck will return for the rolled-up fence

So pleased that my poem "Attribution" from STEEP TEA has been translated into Vietnamese and published by AJAR Press in ABRACADABRA, the publication of A-festival in Hanoi in August 2016. Thank you, Nha Thuyen, and congratulations on the successful inaugural festival!

TLS Aug 19 and 16 2016 from Hal Jensen's review of H. J. Jackson's Those Who Write for Immortality : At the end of his third collection of Odes, right at the "back" of the bookroll, Horace placed a poem which, for 2,500 years, has remained the locus classicus of poetry's unique powers: "exegi monumentum aere perennius" (I have completed a monument more lasting than bronze - although every word requires a scholar's note). More durable than bronze, higher than the pyramids, immune to time and the elements. Horace's poetry guarantees that he will not wholly die ("non omnis moriar"). How quick we all were to buy into that one. How quick to forget what we found at the back of Horace's next bookroll, the Epistles, which appeared in 20 BC, just three years after the Odes. Here, the concluding poem is addressed to the very book (liber) in our hands. It warns of the realities of public life: once out in the world, there is no coming...

Sun in November nothing to ask for nothing to ask

Thursday evening, Oct 27 , it was lovely to hear George Kalogeris read his poetry again. Friday, Oct 28 , bright and early at 8 am a thought-provoking seminar "Poetry and Translation": Marco Antolin's "Overcoming the Abysm of Creative Stagnation: Philip Levine on Translating Antonio Machado, Garcis Lorca, and Cesar Vallejo"; Mary Maxwell's "Correspondences: Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal and the Translation Tasks of Richard Howard and Walter Benjamin"; Diana Senechal's "Translating an Understanding of Poetry Itself: Tomas Venclova's 'Pestel Street'"; Nicholas Pesques' "Translating: Acting". Followed by an exciting plenary panel "Literature in Painting, Painting in Literature": Deborah Epstein Nord's "George Eliot and John Everett Millais: The Ethics of Ugliness"; Rebecca Ranof's "The Occluded Portraits of Dickens and Van Goh"; Ruth Bernard Yeazell's "Henry J...