tonikat, knee deep in nougat, 2017

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tonikat, knee deep in nougat, 2017

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1tonikat
Modifié : Déc 31, 2017, 6:14 pm

Another year, another thread...a small change you may notice, shall see how it fits.

My 2016 thread is here (the nougat reference explained somewhere therein)

Don't think I can edit the thread titles down the years, but who would rewrite such.

I wish everyone here (and elsewhere of course) the best of the season and for a Happy 2017 -- and a peaceful one for everyone in the world, may we begin to see what we're doing and change, talk, understand ourselves and each other (and the planet) - the answers are all there to be read and also unread but in our faces, being, in front of our noses to be turned to, read in life, allowed with restraint, respect, together man and woman upped to, by facing, by talking together in common humanity, no matter differences in apparent creed - through the peaceful meeting of our true and wonderful cultures and respect for all humans.

I'm thinking of some other changes here - not sure anyone else gets anything from me just listing films and tv and theatre seen -- so may do that elsewhere and only list what I comment on from there.

I think I will also wait until my summary at the end of the year, all being well, to build my wall of book covers. We shall see. May make some other changes. I had half thought of making a private group for me and anyone that wanted to read my stuff as I am not sure it is everyone's cup of tea, and my style (even lack of it at times), but so it goes.


My 2017 reading:

~ The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile by Alice Oswald - Poetry, Kindle ed. (RMOT) Comments here
~ Loud Silence by Bill McKnight - Poetry Comments
~ Butcher's Dog, 1, poetry magazine
~ Field Work by Seamus Heaney - poetry, Kindle ed. (RMOT)
~ The Surrender by Scott Esposito - essays/memoir comments
~ Introducing Hegel: a graphic guide by Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, Kindle ed. Comments here
~ The Other Voice by Octavio Paz - essays Comments
~ Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - novel, Kindle ed. Comments here
~ The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton - lectures/essays
~ I and Thou by Martin Buber trans Walter Kaufmann - philosophy/theology, Kindle ed. (RMOT)
~ The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati trans. Stuart C. Hood - novel, Kindle ed. (RMOT)
~ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - novel, Kindle ed. Reread (RMOT)
~ My Business is to Create: Blake's Infinite Writing by Eric G. Wilson - lit crit
~ The Book of Thel in the complete iluminated books, by William Bake - poetry/art (RMOT) reread
~ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the complete illuminated books by William Blake - poetry/art (RMOT)
~ The Gates of Paradise, for children/for the sexes by William Blake in the complete illuminated books - poetry/art (RMOT)
~ There is no Natural Religion by William Blake in the complete illuminated books, reread - art/poetry/philosophy/spirituality (RMOT)
~ Blake by Peter Ackroyd -poetry/biography/lit crit/art crit
~ A Scattering by Christopher Reid - poetry (RMOT)
~ Conjure by Michael Donaghy in collected poems michael Donaghy - poetry, re-read, kindle ed. (RMOT)
~ Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe - novel
~ Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - philosophy, poetics, spirituality, partial re-read
~ Bill's New Frock by Anne Fine - children's fiction, Kindle ed.
~ The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams - children's fiction, Kindle ed.
~ Station Island by Seamus Heaney (RMOT) - poetry
~ The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney Kindle ed. (RMOT) poetry
~ Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney poetry
~ Dart by Alice Oswald Kindle ed. poetry
~ A Dream Play by August Strindberg in Miss Julie and other plays Kindle ed. Drama
~ Poems: Li Po and Tu Fu translated by Arthur Cooper Kindle ed. Poetry
~ The Rhythm of Bernard of Morlaix, Monk of Cluny on The Celestial Country by Bernard of Morlaix trans. Rev. J. Mason Neale Poetry
~ Wild by Cheryl Strayed - memoir



other reading - articles, short stories, essays
- Peter Schlemiel by Adelbert von Chamisso
- Story of your Life by Ted Chiang
- essay - Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death by Pierre Joris (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/joris/todtnauberg.html) (reread)
- essay - William Wordsworth 1: 'A pure organic pleasure from the lines' by Christopher Ricks in The Force of Poetry
- essay - William Wordsworth 2: 'A sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought', ibid.
- interview - https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jean-luc-godard-interview-nouvelle-vague-his...
- review - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/101645? (30/3/17)
- interview - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3137/malcolm-cowley-the-art-of-fiction... (30/3/17)
- interview - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2192/octavio-paz-the-art-of-poetry-no-...
- https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/11/michael-douglas-and-louise-fletcher...
- review - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/15/on-empson-by-michael-wood-review
- The aeroplanes at brescia by Franz Kafka, late spring.
- Meditation by Franz Kafka (26/8/17)
- The Judgement by Franz Kafka (27/8/17)
- The Stoker by Franz Kafka (31/8/17)
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (4/9/17)
- In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka (10/9/17)






a definite greeny brown thing going on, not deliberate, well done Bill

2tonikat
Modifié : Déc 31, 2017, 4:36 pm

current focus:


3tonikat
Déc 27, 2016, 2:51 pm

I posted a bit about goals on the avid reader thread.

I have worked on some rules to keep my reading focussed - supposedly only focusing on two books at a time for one, though that is out the window at present with 10 I'm giving to my currently reading collection, partly that is also due to a number of books I read a little of each day. But I will try to work towards that focus, it may mean I focus on two in a week.

In other ways that general plan means I am also trying to focus on finishing books I have started (those I want to finish) and to read more from the heap on the shelves and in the kindle and more from the canon/s (whatever they are). But also very much to focus more on those authors I really want to read, those that I feel most for in ways that mean I want to read them properly - and make up for lost time and also fill in those gaps.

I'm thinking about a ratio of books to finish and from shelves to read before I allow myself a new book or to read something else.

But, as anyone that has ever followed one of my threads knows, I am not good at sticking to a plan for a year. Though my focus seems to be forming naturally at the moment - it may almost not need so much theory, it's what I want to read for goodness sake. But its also recognising that it must be done, whilst it can be.

I also broke down what I want to read by themes of topics, which is definitely another reason my focus goes as there are a lot of them.

But less chat tonikat, (toni or kat hmm...I can't decide, get both), more speed...lets get to it

4tonikat
Modifié : Jan 2, 2017, 6:00 pm

In the last few days I've tackled my block with the Tales of the German Imagination by reading Peter Schlemiel by Adelbert von Chamisso.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schlemihl

I'd got well stuck with this - I'm not sure I had got far in, but restarted it this time. First it's a novella really, and long for this book I think. Second the tone of voice I found very hard to take, possibly all too close yet at the same time strange and annoying. I could only read it a chapter at a time a lot of the time, but persevered, and of course there is some turn.

I've dimly heard such a story but had not read it and now find, as with other tales in this book, how influential it was and is. It fits with a lot I am interested in and see for example it was mentioned in The manticore - so much for my close reading, or maybe Robertson Davies explained enough. Clearly the idea of shadow side important from a Jungian perspective, and so fitting Davies' approach.

It's another I will think and rethink on, and wish I had read earlier, as with lots of these tales. They are a very good way at imparting wisdom and advice, would have been good to read as a teen.

I certainly seem to be visiting the nineteenth century a lot at the moment. von Chamisso was an aristocratic refugee of the Terror in France, which fits with my recent Dickens reading, and with where I am in Wordsworth's Prelude - not to mention all those influences noted on the wiki page above. Suddenly the nineteenth century is gaining colour again for me. It's so much more interesting than lots of the history I did.

I like that the original meaning of Schlemiel was friend of God and did notice how turning to God was somewhat absent in his situation.

In other nineteenth century related wanderings I watched To walk Invisible last night which I'd recorded from tv - the story of the Bronte sisters creativity and publication at the same time as the decline of their brother. It was really quite powerful and has enthused me to read them now.

I also looked at my priority reads and of about seventy only 8 were by women, so, enough said.

5The_Hibernator
Jan 1, 2017, 9:09 pm

6tonikat
Jan 2, 2017, 5:07 am

thank you and a cockadoodledo to you too

7baswood
Jan 2, 2017, 6:48 pm

I am going to enjoy following your thread.

8arubabookwoman
Jan 2, 2017, 6:57 pm

I was a lurker on your thread last year. This year I hope to comment once in a while.

9tonikat
Jan 3, 2017, 6:09 am

Welcome aboard both of you.

Deborah, I regret to say that there are threads I do not know - and sadly yours has been one of them, not now, I just caught up on your reviews last year, wow. And those quilts are gorgeous. Now to find you for this year.

Comments always welcome.

I read someone, fuzzy patters I'm sure, write somewhere how stress of work affects reading and that's definitely the case with me, or can be, in recent years - it may be a reason why I work to get focus these days, to make what I can of my reading. Having done all that things may change now anyway. I tend to feel like it's my fault, but it's not of course, I help people with stress, am good at that, so I should know, but then it can be hard to do it to yourself, even though I'm pretty good at that too.

Not now sure what prompts me to say that..talking to myself...are you...yes I'm talking to you...no...sorry...humour gene engaged now...or lack of humour gene maybe. Anyway been on leave, getting more reading done, interesting. Ah it may have been to go to explain why I have still not read everyone else's threads.

11tonikat
Jan 14, 2017, 6:58 am



Loud Silence by Bill McKnight

Having posted I was reading two books I've managed to finish two others, neither on my currently reading list, ah, so it is.

I just heard of this book in the last week and of enthusiasm of others for it and as it so chimes with so many things for me I dived in and its a very quick read really, I've read it at least twice and thought about a few days too -- to use what I posted elsewhere to say more:

A brilliant book, I think. Bill McKnight's (with his editor) apparently simple, short poems clearly convey the complexity of the experience of such mental health issues. He shares his experience as a person to other people, difficult experience, hope, honestly. Anyone who has had such experience will know how hard it can be to be clear, or clear in a way that helps us. In doing so there is movement to this book, for me. First he reminds me of the experience of feeling in these ways, of how it feels to be treated by professionals, of the questions it gives a person of themselves, of the questions it gives others (and stigma), of the frustrations and hurdles faced. I got in touch with a felt sense of such difficult times reading this, of how lonely it can feel, of how unhelpful things can be even in the guise of help (often things such helpers fail to recognise or see the power of or do not mean in the way they are felt). But in recognising these things there a power of health, in speaking such feelings, and further as the book progresses clarities are reached, decisions are made, experience of being well is found - difficulty is taken on board, lived with, new approaches emerge, hope.

It is a book that made me laugh out loud and also sigh in recognition, it delighted me to read and recognise such things and to have had them said in such a gentle, witty, beautiful and wise way. I am sure this will help many who encounter such issues, whether as client or helper or friend or family member. That is enough tribute in itself.

12baswood
Jan 14, 2017, 8:24 am

>11 tonikat: Interesting to bring this book to our attention. had to google Bill McKnight to get some information about him.

13tonikat
Modifié : Jan 17, 2017, 5:11 am

hope you got the right Bill McKnight - I don't know him, though exchanged an email. It's a good book I think, but then I would. If those issues are not relevant people may not react so wildly, though it would give food for thought I think.

edit - doh, boy am I slow - did you go searching for poems Bas? His poems are so short that it's not easy to quote without the whole thing. I also didn't find any to link to - let me go look and see though.

14tonikat
Modifié : Jan 22, 2017, 2:23 pm



Letter from an unknown Woman, directed by Max Ophuls

I saw this film on Friday, I may have seen it when much younger, some seemed familiar, but I can't be sure.

A film told in flashback - a man arrives home late at night, left by friends he has only three hours before he is due to go and fight a duel. It is Vienna around 1900. His friends don't really expect him to go, nor does he.

However, the eponymous letter arrives and we have a story in flashback in three parts.

In the first he is moving to this apartment. A young neighbour, Lisa, is interested by his strange belongings, she's sixteeen and becomes more and more interested in him. He's a concert pianist. She, in the apartment below follows all his struggles to play and play well - the future promises much for him, he's already a success. She's very intrigued, there is a delightful scene of her swinging on a swing as he plays, I loved it just for the shot that swings from her point of view. There's teenage talk with a friend of a boy. She is more and more intrigued by this man - there is some transgression when she enters his flat (suddenly I thought of Blue Velvet) - but then what is there for her - she learns her widowed mother is to remarry, she is to move from Vienna to Linz. At the station, maybe amidst some truth of what is happening, hitting her, she breaks away and runs to his flat . . . they've not even spoken, she held a door for him once. . . but he is not in. She sits and waits and late he comes in, with a woman.

Next we find her in Linz and coming of age, courted. But she is able to say no to this man. She moves to Vienna, models clothes in a dress shop - there is a hint of prostitution there, but not her we are told, she is not like the others. Instead she stands outside the apartment until one day he notices her -- and dreams come true, a whirlwind romance. It's not altogether clear whether this is one night, a few days or maybe a week or two. She's shown in this as not saying much of herself to him, almost as though there is not much to her at all, at her most passive -- despite the daring things she has done. One day though he comes to find her in the shop and tell her he must leave, go on tour. She sees him off, he assures her he'll be back in two weeks, she comments in narration, her letter how he did not know himself.

The next episode is about nine years later - she has a child, his child. Yet she has married highly into society (apparently not a turn that was in the book). Yet one day they run across each other -- I will not spoil the denouement. She remains true. Aspects of each other collide, lostness in him apparent.

In seeing the film I was struck by the birth of her love, of it before she knew him. In a way I thought it was also redolent of her love for life, of that time and also of it versus the narrow social confines otherwise on offer. There may also be a reading of it in light of what I think was a shock for her of her mother remarrying, and again of narrow confines within that. Her pianist offers much else. Not least the music which she clearly loves - romantic music too. In a way I could see her as a bit of groupie, a rebel. I could also see her, in loving him through his practice, his struggle, as knowing him very very well though she did not know him at all.

However there was an element of this that looked like obsession too - it confused me. I even compared her to Humbert Humbert in Lolita - someone very stuck in a particular way to love, in a need for a certain love. Happily the scales have fallen from my eyes - in no small part as I read this:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/01/16/martha-nussbaum-loves-knowledge/

But for other reasons too, I mean just take her at face value, a person in love and go with that -- I am happy that I'd still seen positives in Lisa'a love, and I can see some similarity in how she became fixed on love. But she is clearly open to life and change in love in ways Humbert Humbert is not, she does not harm anyone, she is not fixed in a certain requisite of love -- her love is a love of a being that may grow, if he will allow it.

But realising that I see the film not as one of obsessional love, but of true love (which of course has an obsessional side) and of her truth to love opens the film, opens me. She takes risks again an again for how she feels, that brings much good, bad, life, and she is true to it, to her love, to herself. I realise this is a film I will always love and relearn about true love from, and its truth buried within society and ways of being. The need to risk and a need to be open, and true.

In some ways this letter may be from any woman to any man, perhaps, about some potential danger and in so doing may wake us all, if we can let it.

15baswood
Jan 27, 2017, 10:05 am

Enjoyed your film review.

17tonikat
Modifié : Fév 5, 2017, 8:53 am

>15 baswood: thank you :)



The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile by Alice Oswald

This was Alice Oswald’s debut collection. It’s my debut with her, at least complete debut. I began Dart at some point but did not fall for it, then anyway. I’m not sure what brought me back to try this, not just her high reputation and articles wondering if she is our greatest poet, surely, I don’t remember now.

I read it through quite quickly but have been rereading slowly since. As ever I just want to explore my feelings and thoughts on what it does for me, this is not purport to be any more than that, personal reaction/s.

Thinking of Dart and her connection to nature it may be tempting to see her as a nature poet and not looking at some other things. True she writes of nature, but that’s far from all. Her poems in this collection start in a personal, intimate way. Often they seem to mark a journey to a connection to personal feeling, to being able to feel in the world, perhaps to contacting being. It’s a beautiful thing to follow, they seem to arrive at a clarity by means of clarities. It may be tempting to see this as individual, unpolitical — but it occurred to me that the reverse is true, that these poems reassert individual rights and freedoms, to breathe, to feel, to be and be connected to the natural. Simplicities so hidden, as they have been across the ages, but more thoroughly now it seems than ever.

I have done a search on google but have not found poems from this collection to share links to (I know my audience, Bas). I don’t like to quote poems in part and yet don't want to quote whole poems.

They are beautiful. Reading them slowly is a delight, opens me.

There is some social in some poems across a hedge with a neighbour. There are love poems too. She’s a sonneteer which interests me. On my first read my favourite poem was called ‘Poem’ (not a sonnet), it begins:

“You ask me why did I lie down
and when and never rose again.

I of the bluebells,
laid on a succulent mattress, frown.”

ahh no it doesn't work without the whole poem this quoting lark.

She makes very good lines and phrases that work like keys to unlock poems, to unlock me - she has her ideas and she has her flow, but she has taken care with them. There is a love in that, and respect for we who read her…not to mention for her subjects and herself. Maybe that seems a naive and obvious thing to say of a poet, I mean like obvs Toni this is what poets do, it's just she especially impresses me with it, precision in words yet no less poetry - he is an example, from ‘April’, how it ends:

“and us on bicycles — it was so fast
wheeling and trying we were lifted falling,
our blue-sky jackets filling up like vowels…
and now we float in the fair blow of springtime,
kingfishers, each astonishing the other
to be a feathered nerve, to take the crack
between the river’s excess and the sun’s.”

Very precise, first I like how the jackets fill up, but then this movement into being as kingfishers and all of that, and speaking so of exactly how they fly upstream. There’s a lovely poem about cycling a Roman Road soon after that too.
But I think a lot of how much care she has taken, part of that must be with her ideas, to know them and then care taken with the words, knowing them. I tend to gush - no Toni, really? But yes friends, I do…and sometimes they work and sometimes they seem to work but they are not so graceful, really, or is it grace, not so clear perhaps, or maybe clear to me and if you get my tone, not so classic or maybe if you don't get my tone not so discoverable as how that whole kingfisher segment is above, for itself. I don’t know, maybe she just has her voice and I have mine, her ears and I have my own. There is a kind of calmness maybe to it too, that I might miss in my own, in my busy life. Suddenly I remember being so impressed by Niall Campbell the other year when I saw him read, for exactly this, the presence he brought to that reading reminding me of my counselling values, and think of how that is challenged for me in my day to day. The two may find themselves, that silence/space and the words. Though still I think it is to be achieved, however happy in silence you are, to find that clarity with words, and about your own, your intimate thoughts, to gain distance on them and observe them I guess getting to know them again just as she observes other things, so carefully…that is a magic that happens, but often does not for me….but thinking it needs time to dwell on them and meet them, and clarify their problems, be clear on that and then see.

I’m drifting.

She has the sea in many of these poems. I loved her three Sea Sonnets in a row, and giving them all the same name, I like that and fitted her theme of how she saw the sea — I mean as something made up of water within water, sea connected, so good to have these three aspects. I wonder if there are more in her further work. She also has a lot of the moon and the moon reflected in the sea.

My favourite poem so far on this read though is “Ballad of a Shadow” especially for how it closes - again discovery of being.

I suppose by talking about her phrases as well there was an element a bit like Timothy Donnelly at times of argument turning through her poems. I liked that. I know that is something from elsewhere in English literature, I don’t know Donne well, but sonnet wise clearly Shakespeare did this, maybe more obviously or clearly stated. These are subtle and intimate arguments, some with a tone to an intimate or to herself. In her poem ‘Owl Village’ she has a verse:

“Half air, half village,
it murmurs, like the mind upon the brain”

That does remind me of Donnelly…though she came first I think…and it makes me think of Donne for some reason, though he I hardly know, so that may be rubbish of me to say, I shall have to read him to see.

But hey, maybe this clarity of hers is something that does just come to her too, not by secret arts of finding it or working on it, beyond being open. And mine, for what it is just comes to me too sometimes, and it’s just making more of those times that would be key, another argument for a rhythm in living that allows such. Her poem Mountains may be about such openness and finding what is there. The final poem of the first section of the collection, ‘Prayer’ also touches what she is doing, throwing the sun and moon as she says and thinking on her needs, quite wonderful.

The collection concludes with her long poem ‘ The Three wise men of Gotham who set out to catch the moon in a net’ which is based on an old story of how the citizens of Gotham managed to put off a King’s (expensive) visit - this brings together many of the themes, the moon, the sea, perhaps a folly in trying to catch being. On first read I didn’t get so much from this poem, or over-read, sought too many clever points, but on slower read just enjoyed it as story and yes points are there amidst the colours of the poem. The sky as a sea too and people adrift with their nets, throwing more than catching, perhaps.

It also occurs to me that perhaps there is a gender aspect to the collection, the humans in the boat being men. The theme of relationships at times. Perhaps even, though I need to think more on this, it just occurred to me, in giving voice to the thing in the gap in the stone stile. There could be more to this, i want to think on it, as am cautious in myself asserting this.

18Linda92007
Fév 5, 2017, 8:24 am

>17 tonikat: Lovely review, tonikat!

19ipsoivan
Fév 5, 2017, 10:40 am

>17 tonikat:, >18 Linda92007: really compelling!

20tonikat
Fév 6, 2017, 5:52 am

>18 Linda92007: , >19 ipsoivan: thank you both, put a smile on my face.

21edwinbcn
Fév 7, 2017, 1:58 am

Nice review of Alice Oswald's poetry. There aren't that many reviews of poetry on Club Read any more.

22tonikat
Modifié : Fév 7, 2017, 5:15 am

>21 edwinbcn: Then let us cultivate them, but not mass produce. Thanks.

23baswood
Modifié : Fév 8, 2017, 6:23 pm

Enjoyed your review and thoughts on the thing in the gap stone stile.

The section of the poem you quoted with the image of blue jackets filling up like kingfishers has a very arresting penultimate line: to be a feathered nerve to take the crack.... has all sorts of different associations.

24tonikat
Modifié : Fév 14, 2017, 1:16 pm

no argument there bas. Especially after my late waking up. Though you have missed a comma. I think I was reading her as sometimes highlighting another way of being, as poetic, as different at times and missed the most obvious. I suppose that in my quote I have missed any reference to the road and when I wrote my reaction I was very taken with the comparison between the road and river, and the picture she gave me of kingfishers flying upstream.

edit (14/2/17) - I'm not sure I am as confident of the associations you aver now bas, they may be there, but the comma is important and the focus is definitely on the last line, there may be something there as you seem to suggest, as allusion, and if I am understanding you rightly. I'm not sure how I would wax lyrical in those directions, in fact better not to, would not...and important for her method that she approaches this in such ways, for example with the title poem...I got an impression, if you think of the idea of figure and ground of her finding ways of allowing the ground to speak in a way whilst we have the figure, and that may be true in what you say. I was reading this naively as a way to approach Being, but clearly a huge aspect of that is gender. I'm not sure how much I took that for granted or was slightly out of focus about or merely as above. Something to stay with.

25tonikat
Fév 18, 2017, 12:35 pm



The Surrender by Scott Esposito

Just finished this this morning – three essays following their acceptance of who they are. I'm cautious about pronouns and labels, especially the latter as is Scott I guess though they discuss several and also their lack of feeling for them or from them, crossdresser, transvestite, transgender.

A very interesting read – much I recognise even as its in its own slightly different tone, of course. Scott has a well known blog, reads keenly, moves in literary circles, is an author. So his thoughts maybe can chime especially with my own. I simply enjoyed the paragraphs of things read in several years in the final essay, much of which I wish i had read myself, but also helpful in that it was an amount I could grasp reading - I wonder if he read more and didn't mention it all, just the best (went for he as he's published as Scott, let's not overdo it Toni).

I am struck by how much of trans experience is about relationships to labels – I have these ideas myself already, but interesting to see how another experiences these and how hard it is to break out of trying to fit self to a definition, which seems to offer the answer to who we are whereby all may slip into place…but which may in fact totally distance us from our own process, our own feeling as ambiguous and before and beyond labels.

And this is not just true of trans, surely – and it may be one reason some people hate trans people as they throw into question the certainty or answers these labels give them.

Even in breaking from fitting self to the labels that allow hiding, it is hard to avoid yet other labels in seeking to find self and know what we are and be able to say that to others.

Again it occurs to me how essential a part of teaching the limits of knowledge and language are and to allow people to experience themselves and themselves in relation to such possibilities and their boundaries — how hard that is to show in our modern fast lives of answers.

This book especially interesting as presenting the process of such struggles and seekings, apparently honestly, a wonderful thing to share, very real. There is a great richness of experience to it, shared without tidying up for an accepted narrative and destination,. I could understand so much - how in explaining this part of yourself it may be so taboo or impossible that you doubt it even as you say it and so that opens ways that may allow yourself and others to deny it. Or how difficult it can be to simply cross the door step for the first time, or having gone out initially how it may be hard to get the key in the door due to shaking - for having left the house, not even been accosted in any way. Or what its like to wear nail polish for the first time and have it on even times you cannot wholly present as you'd like -- and what it is like when people notice it yet are nice. It would be great if the book helped even one other person in knowing they are not alone.

I totally get where the title is coming from and which Scott touches on towards the end of the book. I'm cautious of that label myself, I may prefer embrace or some other word. But don't doubt the validity of it and relevance of it to break out of the knots of denial of self -- and can see how important that was in Scott's process, I respect it for him. Maybe I should try a bit more surrendering too myself, without getting too Mills & Boon. But it is something that can help, I know that, not doubt yourself even as you are yourself, bor-ing.

It's also given me a need to watch some films by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, whom I've not seen before - especially Close-up which is central to the second essay.

A wonderful book, maybe not for everyone, maybe I am somewhere in its core audience, in sympathies not just of gender but of writing and reading. It seems to me it may also be one that may yet develop further iteration, I hope so.

26tonikat
Fév 19, 2017, 2:37 pm

ok, so understand no rush to respond on that one, lets see this year so far have covered love going wrong, mental health, gender, and further, transgender...I'm still thinking about Heaney, but may he be safer ground, maybe not, the Troubles.

27tonikat
Modifié : Fév 26, 2017, 9:40 am

more on recent elections/referendum and new technologies used to campaign

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-ba...

it gets worse

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-...

If I'm not here much then you know why.

28SassyLassy
Fév 26, 2017, 5:55 pm

It's good to see The Guardian still doing such reporting. I hope it survives the sleeper bot apocalypse!

29tonikat
Fév 26, 2017, 6:31 pm

who knows

30tonikat
Mar 1, 2017, 3:25 pm

That wasn't a very good reply to you Sassy...I meant I was at a bit of a loss for words.

_____

I'm having a very fallow time with reading. The Surrender bucked a trend. It could be a bit annoying as I have more time to read than usual, even though I have lots of things to do I have a bit more time for it all. But no I'm almost at a standstill - read a few articles, read more Emily Dickinson - But the bio of Blake and Great Expectations are at a standstill. I'm at the start of part three of GE. In a way I don't know what is the matter with me. In a way I don't care I'm letting myself realise. I had two weeks at the end of January like this and found I started to write a bit myself as a result. I'm not particularly getting anything writing wise at the mo and unlike then also have no focus to prompt me, for now. I had to miss the group on later Heaney this week too due to a meeting. I have enjoyed seeing a couple of documentaries - one by Heaney that I find very rich called 'Something to write home about', I saved it when shown after he passed away, I find its effect powerful and find it very beautiful -- it reminded me of my own childhood, in a totally different experience sort of way. The other a documentary by Irish TV, also very good.

I can't remember such a period for me for a few years. My routine has been shaken up a bit. I like the word fallow for it. On the other hand part of it came with a kind of reassessment or different sense of reading - questioning the point a bit - did I just say that -- but yes I did. I guess reached more towards achieving some things and with reaching those goals that sense that hey, life didn't change that much -- and so much in the world so much more important. Myy own writing, important as it is to me, just more words amidst the noise. None of this in a depressed way especially - but a realistic way I think...is it in the preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus he speaks of how little is achieved in achieving what he does. Well I'm sure I have not done anything like he, but a similar feeling - one I remember from achieving what I wanted with a qualification once. Fallow time and reassessment of perspective.

I think I've been working quite hard at my reading - that is probably at least a bit evident from my threads. I've not studied lit as lit really since the most basic level. Kind of surprised myself with getting into writing poetry and having done so maybe making up for lost time and feeling I need to have read more to be able to practice. But with it can go some sense of playfulness, maybe -- that's probably going too far. It's a mystery to me why I wasn't reading poetry more at a younger age, despite loving it. Maybe that explains why I do now. But I cannot force feed it. As I type this I also think hey why not just read some different things, but no, no appetite for others' language really or structure of thought. That reminds me I sometimes get a sense that in reading others their language and thinking starts to structure my own, and part of this gap was quite enjoying just putting my own more into neutral, to find their own gear...but when I first stop reading I can feel just that, in neutral, drifting for a few days.

Of course I did read Field Work and The Surrender -- and also got back to Dickinson, I probably read at least a hundred of her poems...its interesting working through the collected (I'm reading Johnson's 1955 reading volume) when you come upon a famous one, like 'oh here it is' but of course the sense that this is where it came in her own process not really correct at all. I'd not been able to read her at all in a very busy autumn - not for want of it, but as I felt so far away from the space I needed to really feel for her, I was too busy...or at least feel as I had in the summer. I started another biography of her too, but that has to go on hold, too many other priorities. I also did read some criticism of her, some of a collection of essays, some from pre Johnson/1955 but most from then until the early 60's. Some of that somewhat infuriating - prompted me to learn about Yvor Winters and read an interesting article about him.

The tone of commenting on others' work is so important - I keep rediscovering that, and practicing it poorly myself...or even this which may be unnecessary comment for many a reader here. I suppose as with last summer trying to find my way to my own rhythm - I'm tempted to read some of the research on 'Flow' but also think when I am feeling this way may be far better to feel my own way with my own...and exploring and trying to find ways to work towards following my own bliss, as Joseph Campbell argued - it occurred to me that may be an aspect of what in Christianity is called the Holy Spirit. Campbell took this himself from one part of an ancient teaching in sanskrit, I forget what it was in, it was one of three ideas, the one which he felt he had some understanding of and that he came to take as a motto.

I was reading Red Pine's commentary on The Heart Sutra too - but that also has gone on hold, though I have thought about the sutra a lot, its view of wisdom and its concluding mantra, which seems so valid in our knowledgable times. Maybe that explains some of this sense I have too - I hadn't thought of that. Oh.

I had a bit of a sense that I should be doing a lot more and achieving more completion in my reading, but don't have it that much anymore. This fallowness feels alright, suggests meadows.

___

(I decided it was ok to go on posting here as those articles above really only mention facebook.)

33tonikat
Modifié : Mar 26, 2017, 8:10 am



Introducing Hegel: a graphic guide by Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, kindle ed.

I enjoy these guides sometimes, as a great overview. This was no disappointment.

I thought I would read some Hegel, I'm also about two thirds of the way through the amazing preface to his Phenomenology. I've long meant to and was prompted this time as I saw the film Arrival and then read the short story on which it was based - both wonderful, though aware of the film, whilst I love it of mixing styles a bit, maybe doing what Tarkovsky warned against in his book a bit. It prompted me for some reason in its talk of teleology and also as so many critics speak of Hegelian coming to presence in movies and I've always wanted to read more of this. Reading this reminded me of lectures and classes I had entirely forgotten which spoke of Hegel in some detail but I am sure I have not read the man himself, yet have also remembered how often in such classes I always thought I should, no doubt other areas demanded focus first, unfortunately.

This overview was a great reminder and of his importance. He is great on process, the whole of it and not just a teleological view - the process not complete until its end and then all of its parts, not just product - this resonates with my counselling and I'm trying to follow up on how far this influenced Carl Rogers, which I'm sure I have heard of but not (re)discovered reference to yet. Also his idea of the master/slave relationship, so influential and of the primitive, classical and romantic in art, but which I see maybe in other ideas. Reading more of him has also reopened the way to many more thinkers for me.

It's slow progress with the preface - I raced to where I am and then I think I've been digesting it for two weeks or so and no wish to go further. I will. Then maybe even more slowly move beyond that, partly due to having so many practical things to do at the moment.

I have read a bit more than I was, made a little progress on Blake and with Pip's expectations. But also various reading on Chinese poetry and especially Li Bai. Also a little other progress, Seamus Heaney and Emily Dickinson (I'm looking forward to the new film on her). I was drawn to try and write something today as I got an email it is my thinganniversary, I'd been looking forward to this but had quite forgotten, it put my change of focus recently into perspective as posting my thoughts and feelings on my reading in the last ten years has been A Very Good Thing for me.

34tonikat
Modifié : Mar 26, 2017, 3:26 pm

I have not kept up with films seen in general or in the course I am taking on romantic films, where love goes wrong. We have seen some amazing films on the course, two of which I missed. it has introduced me to Jaques Demy, Julio Medem and Wong Kar-Wai and further educated me to Max Ophuls, Bergman and Milos Forman. Last week we watched -



Lovers of the Arctic Circle d. Julio Medem

This was such a beautiful film, so moving. As the credits rolled my emotions just kept building, when they stopped I needed to step out for a moment, very unusual for me.

What can I say - an film I now Love. It seemed to me that it had some conceit, in a way that in some ways made me think of Amelie of explaining through apparent tangents why or maybe how things happen or come to -- and this for me then makes its ending exceptionally powerful and of another tone altogether to Amelie. In the process it never seemed short of wonderful and wholly made sense of these people, for me...and in so doing took a hammer to my frozen lake - opened the world, the universe, myself and so others, to me. Added all his films to my list to see asap, had missed these.



In the Mood for Love d. Wong Kar-Wai

And who'd have thought this week could compare -- and yet it did. Not surpassing, to compare in that way is nonsense. They are each their unique wholes. but this too is a film I now Love. I've watched it again already.

A film framed by quotations - are they poetry I wondered, are they famous Chinese poetry ,it is not credited, I think it more likely they are the writer/director's. A film partly influenced by an earlier 1948 Chinese masterpiece Springtime in a small town. As such it reminds me of Chinese poetry in a reexamination of those themes, as so much poetry does. Also the way it does so - surely one of the most poetic films I have ever seen...linear time challenged, the passing of time observed, the feeling of the time summoned, I guess.

The story? Two married couples have rooms next door to each other. A romance occurs -- and a relationship between those left. A relationship we never know for sure as to whether it is consumated - the film perhaps like classical Chinese drama or poetry assumes that Confucian impulse to be an example. Restrained passion. Many may think of Brief Encounter. I wondered of these two almost as written characters written into their roles, wife, husband and respecting their tradition whilst also exploring its limits their limits to change. Perhaps we see how far they may in the end. As such I think it also had wider redolence as to the passing of time in general and these particular times, the effect/affect of the Communist revolution (we are in Hong Kong), post war capitalism, a challenge perhaps to traditional themes that seem so much to frame the film for me. I also think it passes beyond the individual before our eyes. Beyond the particular through being so particular. Its ending for me wholly worked and gave a dizzying perspective, which tended to the eternal whilst remaining wholly bound to eternity of the discrete particular.

I - am - a - fan. It is aesthetically beautiful and obviously so in content but also in form and I feel has the deepest narrative and philosophical substance, whilst a poem only. I am grateful to have seen it. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, beyond my words.

It helps.

35SassyLassy
Mar 26, 2017, 4:30 pm

Haven't seen Lovers of the Arctic Circle, but In the Mood for Love is definitely one of the best films going. Maggie Cheung is amazing and the mood here is done so well. Tony Leung also does another excellent performance in Lust, Caution

Sounds like a fun course. May I recommend Love in the Time of Cholera from 2007 with Javier Bardem which I just saw? I was surprised it wasn't in Spanish given the cast, but it was well done.

What other films are on tap.

36tonikat
Modifié : Mar 26, 2017, 6:10 pm

Yes I should have mentioned both actors -- they are beautiful, wonderful and amazing in what they convey. As also is the look achieved for them, her dresses are amazing. I was thinking, I have a poet friend who has spoken to me of the need to inhabit content in poetry or drama...and here I had a very thorough sense that this film, and so all its parts, are thoroughly steeped in what is conveyed. Given that it was not shot in Hong Kong at all that is very interesting.

It is much fun. I have not read that Marquez and so have put off seeing the film, perhaps I should not.

Recent powerful films - I love Paterson, went to see it twice and it should arrive on dvd release tomorrow.

From this course I saw Smiles of a summer night again and loved it all the more. We watched Lola and I am now in love with Jaques Demy's films on that basis - another to work through. Then Marriage Italian Style d. Vittorio de Sica - was wonderful, highly strange in a modernist sort of way, Sophia Loren gorgeous and acting wonderfully...a film that is often dismissed as Italian romcom and lesser de Sica but seemed, whilst one that in a way makes itself hard to love, was at the same time important and probably influential (its ending made me wonder how far it may have influenced the not long after Taming of the Shrew (Taylor/Burton) (just me and the Italian mise en scene at the end?). Then we saw Loves of a Blonde which I'd never heard of but which was wonderful and must be hugely influential - Ken Loach for example was, and also I saw a big influence, especially in one sequence, on the recent film Ida which I also Love. So now have seen quite a bit of Forman. I then missed two films, Play it again Sam which I have never ever seen (!), I think, but have bought and also a film called Confidence from Hungary which would very much like to see now. Next week we conclude with a Mexican film (take that DT) called Blue Eyelids (as if I would) directed by Ernesto Contreras which must be good to round off one of these courses.

I'm not a lot more sure of love as a result - but maybe a few things to avoid, not least having too sure an idea what it is, perhaps or expecting it to go right. Marvellous course though.

Three non course films that have stood out - Black Mountain poets which I found funny and lyrical with a great Zen/poetry joke; Arrival as I said above, loved it but feel a bit guilty as it was not wholly Tarkovskian, no not that at all really, but mainstream that somehow also involved me very powerfully; Seymour: An Introduction d. Ethan Hawke, not Salinger but completely invigorating and heart helping, I have bought Seymour's book about playing the piano as a result, as though i don't, but hope to, it has a lot of stuff in it helpful to me the counsellor, the poet, the person.

37tonikat
Mar 28, 2017, 9:31 am

sorry probably too much, an info splurge.

38tonikat
Modifié : Mar 29, 2017, 11:44 am

I was thinking about Tolstoy yesterday. The man who concluded that art was about the transmission of feeling between one person and another and at its highest the transmission of religious or spiritual feeling. And having concluded this how he then concluded that most of his own work did not match his own standards for what art should be - including War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

So, my thought was I usually think of this as meaning that they did not have a message as clearly as later work, that they did not clearly enough for him teach of the religious insight he later had. But then yesterday I thought about it sightly differently - I thought about it as a tone or feeling he may set for a piece, as poetry may do, and then explore that tone, transmitting it. I wondered if the very realism of those novels might have been part of what he disliked, that it may have diverted from the tone he wanted in showing other tones, and so for him losing clarity.

I'm sure this isn't a new idea, it seemed new to me. In a way I don't remember in detail what he says of his own work other than dismissing much of it apart from a few later pieces (in what is art anyway)...of course other work followed it which I had thought of, perhaps, in terms of singularity of message, but will now wonder about that tone.

This also gives me personal questions in our plural world and seems to me also part of the question of some division in the world, whereby some would insist on their prime important tone and how it must be sung, and others are diverse and exploring and busy with other aspects of their ear, eye and all.

I guess it means I must go back to What is art?

39tonikat
Modifié : Mar 29, 2017, 3:44 pm

More thoughts - I was thinking about my collection having posted on the questions for the avid reader thread - and thinking about my 'collections' and how I have tried to rediscover my priorities and what I really desire to read amongst what I have. I suddenly thought it has been like I have been mining and have a huge heap of excavated rock, some of it richer ore than others, at least for me. Something to think on. Get back to a book, or something Kat.

40tonikat
Modifié : Avr 7, 2017, 6:07 pm

I've been thinking about the tone of voice I post in - I think I come here a bit gushing at times..I do like to share enthusiasm and feeling, but don't want it to be habitual.

In CBT self help I've come across the idea for people feeling stressed to deliberately act calm and how this can actually help us be calm. I don't feel stressed but I had the interesting idea that the tone i use may be a way of trying to summon or find my way towards what it would have - playful lucidity perhaps, charm yet understanding. I don't know, maybe I do myself down and like with poems where writing mostly doesn't just come, or even the first lines, so no surprise to try and summon and work our way toward such things. But having thought this it makes me think again about what I would like to achieve and how.

I've written quite a bit about conveying feeling and this tone may be that typical way of doing so friendly, I hope, open, feeling based and trying to balance serious/playful and witty. It is influenced by deliberately trying not to write too academically or like some student essay or would be serious review...without hopefully losing seriousness. But to be real. I also write and post quite quickly which may also influence this - that tone may in fact be about trying to catch spontaneity too.

I don't want to navel gaze too much - so, stop - just something I am thinking about. I also think a lot about Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy when he moves from speaking of Ancient Greece to also speak of his own time and how he carried the same authority in how he spoke, when it occurred to me that that may not be quite appropriate. So, here, I wonder if I look for the tone I may have with things I have very much connected to, or maybe read around about more or even studied with others, when I may not have as much claim to speak as such -- which may even be a species of being a bit dumb, is it Socrates' view of what is stupid to pretend you know things you don't...something I've definitely done as an adult, as I got older, more than as a child...and something in a way I sometimes feel the world invites.

I don't always have as much time to think on this and what I do -- so habit does come into it if writing quickly.

I suppose not far behind in my thoughts might be thoughts of other writing and as ever poetry. I won't drone on about that -- but it does then also make me think about who I am writing for...I guess it may be I do so to some extent to the people that have interacted on my threads over the years, some sadly not about here these days...but I wonder if in being conversational and informal if tone changes, maybe that is obvious. There is always the danger of sticking to a tone that has succeeded...maybe mo so if writing less seriously (?). To be continued - more in action than in words, may try drafting and then sleeping on reviews, spontaneity still in them, but chance of revision...just spontaneity not immediately shared, which may be good, the discipline of not speaking when you want to.

Right - so in actual reading I've been reading essays in the Oxford lectures of Christopher Ricks and James Fenton - The Force of Poetry and The Strength of Poetry respectively. I find Ricks more technical and a lovely understander - what Auden said of him as a critic poets dream of is famous, and I can understand it. A friend signposted me to the essays on Wordsworth and I loved them both. Fenton's lectures also fascinating - less technical, but still fascinating - especially enjoyed him on Larkin and Auden. Lots of essays still to read, though can find that hard of poets I have not read, there are still some I have some awareness of.

41ipsoivan
Avr 7, 2017, 7:56 pm

First off, I really want to have a look at Ricks and Fenton.

And secondly, as someone who has to do a lot of both formal and informal writing for work, I hear you on managing tone. I find that I often have to draft and revise my writing at work because I can't get the sound I want spontaneously. So, a kind of polishing goes into achieving the sound of spontaneity, but not real spontaneity.

On LibraryThing, I give myself (usually) permission to just write spontaneously, which may not come read as spontaneous as if I had revised.

42tonikat
Modifié : Avr 8, 2017, 6:19 am

I hope you enjoy those lectures, have a lot of faith you will.

Thank you for your words and experience. I write a lot at work, clinical notes and letters mostly - so this is different. I also don't get to talk about reading much, I'm not in my group these days. Did enjoy the few Heaney classes/groups I went to. But have also been developing as a writer, so I suppose this is an outlet to talkbooks (boy is it ever from confines) and write about them...so maybe, undeliberately, since I was first on LT for all my spontaneity I am also working on something in myself. Now, do I let that go a bit to just chat...nah, not entirely, but will be more careful with it - maybe more variety in approach and chat.

There is something in just reaching the summit of reading a book also that influences tone - a wish to share (hopefully) the exhilaration (hopefully) of the view...but am going to try and think on that a bit and my drive to.

spontaneity,
spontaneously revised spontaneity,
unspontaneously devised spontaneity,
spontaneous combustion,
oh my!

permissions granted
unbound license ahoy
let's laugh me hearties,
when we can,
and turn the page
to snow

43ipsoivan
Avr 9, 2017, 9:09 am

: )))

44tonikat
Avr 12, 2017, 6:41 am

Of course, in time, the task is to respect new snow despite the mess we've had, the tracks, find a way to help them and on.

I just read Fenton's final chapter on Auden. Beautiful and Auden's poetry.

Can we help though? Find our humanity, cherish, nurture it in ourselves, all others?

But I came back to say no tone is perfect, cannot be, to self or others, none complete, none impervious to striking a wrong note for self or others in their tune. Remember this, try to hit notes with thought of others, remember this when that cannot be done. Remember we must play, for myself, others too for themselves, remember it of each other...and through it find where we are, have been, could go.

45tonikat
Modifié : Mai 3, 2017, 7:55 pm

April articles

http://www.newworldlibrary.com/NewWorldLibraryUnshelved/tabid/767/articleType/Ar...

posted to keep track - I had a very Joseph Campbell type day yesterday to which this is all very relevant after a week in which it was relevant...rewriting a myth, wondering about form, reconnecting to not knowing it but feeling connected to it.

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/dickens4.html - Dickens and Religion/Christianity

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hunt-the-slipper/ - Roland Barthes on language (from 1971)

May articles

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufakis-greece-greatest-p...

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/05/02/refuge/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/05/02/seneca-consolation-to-helvia/

46tonikat
Modifié : Juil 24, 2017, 12:12 pm

Of course also aware of what I say in writing about others writing - its so easy to start getting lost in the truth/s I pursue and judging others by them -- or maybe seeming to even when not doing so -- so always want to remain provisional, write of my feeling, not start taking myself too seriously.



Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Kindle ed.)

A book I am glad to have eventually read, and sad I did not as a young person, as it gave exactly what I sought, perspective on paths taken, what counts.

A tale of young Pip, scared out of his wits and guilty and ashamed of it. Of his encounters with Miss Havisham and her young ward, who she's come to twist away from her own heart. Of Pip's fall into some Great Expectations and in that perhaps a parable of how people may fall...perhaps did fall in those times of class and opportunity...into wanting to make themselves into something they perhaps barely understood, but which meant so much, gentlemandom, so easily misunderstood...and especially so when so much is available to distract ourselves with, entertain, act the part, lose touch with heart...and how what is most important may effectively be undervalued in the glare of this other thing, amidst even those trying and aiming at that, giving it...and all the social and personal lostnesses in between.

We see Pip finally meet just what those expectations mean, reality, and in doing so losing everything - very nearly.
There is a turn towards the end, which I won't give away, but which I could wonder if it makes the actual ending all a dream, a false ending. Even as I see it also as not -- and that final ending, one which in its very end some quibble with, I found quite beautiful, wholly earned for any lightness on the female side, a story trusted in...and a welling up in the eyes as I think of its beauty. A triumph.

He is often described as sentimental - I can see that, but these are the sentiments of the desperate, those that know the value of what they choose, what they must hold onto. It seems to me that Pip finds what is most in his heart, what most needs to be done to live authentically, and finds this in a difficult way, with no further expectations beyond knowing his mistake and living in light of them daily.

I was thinking of Dickens as a very Christian writer -- and know this is not simply so, a very knowing relationship to organised religion there. But I was glad to find this, the quote from a letter he wrote therein which supports my feeling:

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/dickens4.html

I am interested in his episodic writing and was also interested to learn that he listened to feedback from his public when he decided on plot turns. The feeling I have of him is he'd find his way back to showing some important aspect of life that goes beyond his words but in which they steep and beyond no matter what plot turn he took. I value what he shows very highly. His capturing of characters quite unforgettable and honest - for all modern psychobabbley insights and knowingness (amidst some that may label him sentimental) still of course such a rare talent, I think...or maybe I have been reading the wrong people. A book to be grateful for.

My copy included an essay on it by George Bernard Shaw - he has high praise but then seems not to get some of what I valued the book for, it led me to wonder if he was deliberately writing to be argued with so we argue ourselves to what is right, would that be didactic? Kind of socratic didactic? I have no idea, if so then a very generous thing to do, but on the other hand I think i largely just did not agree -- but I'm not going to reread him now in taking myself so seriously and launching into academic arguments, i can't even remember the exact things i disagreed with.

Now to decide on my next and when it may be a journey to embark upon.

deleted my further comments whilst I research them - I may try and write on them.

47thorold
Mai 2, 2017, 2:48 am

>46 tonikat: Knowing GBS (but not having read that essay, AFAIK), I should think your guess is quite likely to be right. He was a great believer in tricking people into using their brains.

Dickens is someone we should certainly read when we're young, but it doesn't really matter if you haven't, because you're likely to get something quite different out of the books when you read them later in life. I was put off him as a child by the sentimentality of David Copperfield and didn't really come back to him until I read Bleak House in my student days (and of course thought "Wow - this guy can write!"). The real problem with Victorian fiction is the time investment, though. When I was 12 I would have thought nothing of tackling something the length of Little Dorrit on a 2 week library loan (with four or five other books), but these days...

48tonikat
Modifié : Mai 2, 2017, 8:21 am

>47 thorold: lol well he just annoyed me a bit. I don't like trickery like that (if that's what it was).

Yes I wish i had tried him more when young. He was definitely seen by my peers as well uncool...and surrounded by the trappings of progress I feel I ignored him. He is a time commitment, this is true, but feels well worth it at the mo.

edit - I did get a bit emotional there in my review - but I think the truth of a heart was tended to at the end, whether real a rebirth or realised in a dream (and a rebirth), which makes me think of Keats on the holiness of the heart, perhaps.

49ipsoivan
Mai 2, 2017, 7:47 pm

>47 thorold:, >48 tonikat: I've moved in and out of reading Dickens. I enjoyed him as a teen. When I was in my impatient 20s and 30s, I tended to dismiss him until, like thorold, I read Bleak House. At first, Esther's cloying voice just about did me in, but with further development, I began to see why he is considered such a great novelist. I need to get back to him--it's been a few years, and a few decades since my epiphany.

50tonikat
Mai 3, 2017, 5:50 am

>49 ipsoivan: "impatient 20s and 30s", so it's not just me. He's a great novelist - I'm seeing some of the criticism, for example lack of depth in his portrayals or of psychology, as perhaps even a sign of his greatness, something understood and chosen to be painted with another brush stroke, and in that an interesting respect, possibly, for others and boundaries, something very human in his way -- and no loss of vividness of the characters in that.

51ipsoivan
Mai 3, 2017, 8:30 am

>50 tonikat: Yes, we can't really expect realism from him, which is where I failed as a reader in the past. I learned to just sit back and appreciate his stylized depictions. And I learned to live with his archness.

52tonikat
Mai 14, 2017, 3:53 pm

^ he is wonderful.

I've been thinking that not giving us loads of interior psychology might be quite realistic in itself. His archness I need to think about, and read more to be able to do so.

53tonikat
Mai 16, 2017, 3:55 pm



The Other Voice by Octavio Paz

It has reoccurred to me that one thing underlying my thoughts on style is also that, as a poet (of some kind, not everyone may agree) and as someone developing in lots of ways that I may stumble into trying to talk seriously or review when only partly credentialed in a way, or trying to appear that way, or falling into trying to when I should not -- and so maybe I stick a bit in writing about poetry read or poetics and some other things. So as always in my comments, discussing what strikes me, makes me feel and not intending any would magisterial pomposity.

This was first published in 1990, the year Octavio Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize. It's a collection of essays on modern poetry. It got my attention as I saw a remark by him somewhere about Emily Dickinson in comparison to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and I hoped there would be more on this therein (there was on Sor Juana but not really in comparison as I remember it). It's been some weeks since I read it - I will read it again to become more familiar with it.

It was helpful to read as it begins with a consideration of extended poems - long poems. These are something I am not well read of - even Homer or Milton, I've not even finished Wordsworth's prelude for all I am loving it. His tone has authority - he clearly has read them, read them well and has of course also written significant long poetry. Incidentally he makes a very interesting comment as to how the Anglophone critics had neglected Spanish speaking work. he also, I now understand, had written a book on Sor Juana - who now interests me, but perhaps this explains his bias to her, whom the remark I saw he thought more a first class thinker than Emily.

I won't try to summarise his arguments - they are written very accessibly, whilst also clearly engaged with the problems of writing and where it was at at the time he wrote (that first essay in fact came from the mid 70's). Curiously I now find it hard to really remember the structure of his argument - but his tone was very interesting. I remember feeling he sometimes wandered in his own directions and I remember thinking in one of his readings he missed something...oh dear, now I am going to have to get the book to clarify that...

ah yes, looking at the book again reminds me how interesting to me the themes he identified were, but also how some of his interest was just a bit different to mine, or how I'd seen it (not saying his is not the better). But one chapter is about the idea of 'the few and the many' -- which, take 'et pluribus unum' for example, is an idea that fascinates me. In discussing it and the men and women that read poems he quotes a Juan Ramon Jimenez dedication to a book - "To the immense minority" -- and I was a bit frustrated in his thinking on this that I did not see him consider that in the individual, perhaps psychologically, in our relation to ourselves - my poetic self can be an immense minority, I think...I mean it's vast, maybe the majority even, but seems minority in how far it is released or I am in touch with it, but once you do, well, that is well known to be different in scale, quality etc. This may be a pedants point - and maybe just mine in terms of where I was as I read...and he was just going other places with what he wrote.

Overall it was well worth reading, a lovely tone and interest throughout - I will read again and need to think on it all much more (read more long poems). Not least, and another reason I read it was as I had drafted my longest poem yet, and most successfully for me for something long(ish -- not in comparison to the poems he discusses). It is interesting too in terms of how it has dated and how it has not and also how whilst not dating in some way how what has happened may be slightly different to what he muses on as may have happened in the years after publication.

It ends -

"If human beings forget poetry, they will forget themselves. And return to original chaos."

this is both individually and socially and culturally of immense relevance of course. I forgot poetry once. I see its loss as significant in many ways far beyond me and nothing directly to do with me, in our fast, mediated world. Everyone has poetry in them, I believe, if they can learn to recognise what is their own, if they are not confused by what they learn of as poetry and if those that think they know, are culturally invested as knowing what poetry is, do not inhibit others to silence through the demands of their own aesthetic.

54thorold
Mai 16, 2017, 4:09 pm

>53 tonikat: Thanks - another very interesting review, and someone else I've felt vaguely guilty about not reading. Obviously I should. I've got The labyrinth of solitude on my TBR, but I feel more attracted by reading what he has to say about poetry...

55tonikat
Mai 16, 2017, 5:22 pm

^ thank you - I want to read his poetry now, and a lot of the lots of poetry he referenced.

56tonikat
Mai 19, 2017, 9:10 am

I've gone back to Tolstoy's Wise Thoughts for Every Day, as not having them may not have helped, it is good to have them when things are challenging and/or if you're not reading so much. Today, amidst all my concerns about reading on these threads, he says:

"If we could think independently, we could do without a lot of unnecessary reading. it is harmful to read too much. The greatest thinkers I've met amongst scholars were those who read the least.

If you read bad books, you cannot read too few; if you read good books, you cannot read too many. Bad books are like moral poison." (May 19)

Food for thought, and a good excuse for my lower numbers of books finished.

I'm reading small bits of a number of things, not so much of those foci I have at the top of the thread, alas. One book that is delighting me is Finding them gone: visiting China's poets of the past by Red Pine...following a thirty day pilgrimage to memorial halls and graves and containing a sample of poems he translates from each poet. I knew China loved poetry, but this has opened my eyes.

One book I have finished is:



The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton

I don't want to say too much about this book - his Oxford lectures. It is not as technical as Christopher Ricks' book but just as enjoyable. I've not read all the poets Seamus Heaney's book contains and so have not read all of his book, but here I think the only poet I had not read (as a main subject) was Marianne Moore and he's got me to buy a copy of her first collection.

Elizabeth Bishop comments in an essay on reading one summer, if I remember right, how important it is when reading poetry to also learn of the poet, of their context. These essays read as appreciations of poets and their circumstances - I find him generous towards them an well read of their work to at once show them as people and clarify their work, not stuck in the everyday view of them, seeing through to some of their dynamic and care and respecting their person-ness beyond rumour about them and beyond their own apparent words, greatly enjoyable.

I stalled in reading it when he spoke of Marianne Moore at first and quoting Germaine Greer on female poets lacking role models. However when I went back his take on Moore, Bishop and then Plath seemed very sensitive and makes the point that whilst Moore was cautious of feminism she was very involved in liberation of women, though may have preferred to see herself as a poet, not confined as a female poet. He moved to speak of Bishop and her experience of such tensions before concluding with a chapter on Plath that clarifies how she in her later generation and with her specific concerns so clearly needed to identify herself as poetess, whilst Moore and I think Bishop he'd argue would have been happy to be seen as poets.

It's a book I'll definitely reread and think on. having spoken of these female poets he moves on to consider D. H. Lawrence very interestingly and dynamics that informed him, which I was not entirely aware of, including some views on sexuality. Before a conclusion with three excellent chapters on Auden, whom i understand he knew, and again clarifying context and intent and point of view for Auden.

Earlier in the book he'd looked at Larkin (fascinating, especially about his father's views of Nazi's and an interesting analysis of a dynamic for Larkin) and also had looked at Heaney and Wilfred Owen and at some other aspects of poetry.

A fascinating book full of interesting comments and detail. Lots for me to think on and reread about, maybe as i read these poets.

57SassyLassy
Mai 19, 2017, 3:59 pm

>46 tonikat: Just catching up here. I first read Great Expectations around age 9 and loved it. It is a book I have reread several times at about five year intervals and each time I get something different out of it. Over the years I have moved from the childhood terror of Magwitch, the teenage fascination with Estella and the abhorrence of Miss Havisham, into actually looking at the individual characters and developing a real appreciation of the more minor ones and the way they tie the story together.

All that is by way of saying keep reading it and others of his work in the years to come.

58tonikat
Modifié : Mai 28, 2017, 7:21 am

>57 SassyLassy: great advice - I miss all those rereads and ways it was not a thread in my life before now, not in this full way.

edit - but good to know its been there for you, for others, that somehow seems in keeping with the spirit of the book.

59tonikat
Modifié : Mai 20, 2017, 9:32 am

Random thought - do you ever read a book and start to think something like 'hey this is another chalked off, another for the list, another for this year's total?'..cos when I do think something like that, unless it is like flying along or short short, I think that is the beginning of disengagement stuckness, barrenness...it's taking me out of I-thou with it and into I-it, it's undermining the whole experience with a good book, undermining the feeling, presence, freedom within it. I've stopped giving my list numbers, I think I did last year too...and have done that in the past on some past threads, though when time comes to be looking back it can then be harder/more work to get these numbers when you want to review, but I think it's part of this. Maybe its just my own madness, but chime away if it make any sense.

Something in me increasingly needs to commit more and more to I-thou not I-it...and that is ok, in fact that is best, it is only what it is all about, what I-thou, which is what all is all about...the rest is just counting and classifying.

Somehow this is related to having seen another screening of All About Eve last night -- as I feel Bette Davis' character is very I-thou (though often lost in that and in the I-it her success has generated), she is at least in touch with heart and whatever role she has there is always more of her -- whereas Eve is very I-it...she is not worshipping heart but chasing after an object, and so whilst some may read the title as a comment on women in general, I think I prefer to read it as a comment on this Eve and anyone making her mistake, as somehow this really is all there is about this Eve...though at the end I think she starts to get more reality. I also think the films self reference and apparent comment on superficiality of film somehow comments to draw attention to the unreality of such a clear cut case study, as this can never be all there is about Eve, or about any person, though yes the rest may be very hidden.



60tonikat
Modifié : Mai 27, 2017, 2:50 pm

I may be repeating myself but it also occurred to me that I let go of books sometimes when their grip is lost on me somewhat - emotional excitement about reading it, gone or going. I have definitely said before but it may also be not moving through some turn or knot in the book or in myself or in myself about reading the book. It just struck me today -- this week I am gripped by The Tartar Steppe and should finish it soon, having got stuck after chapter three sometime in the last year or so.

Last week I read I and Thou by Martin Buber translated by Walter Kaufmann. (Kindle ed.)

I really liked Kaufmann's translation and notes on translation - but have been stuck on his preface, the style did not sit well with me. He also does something Buber does not - he speaks of the possibility of It - It relationships (and others). This had occurred to me as I read but I noticed Buber did not speak of such relationships, but did instead speak of different aspects and ultimately wholenesses of the I. Maybe Kaufmann moves beyond this but it put me off and I must get back and complete his introduction. I'll add further comment on that as needed.

As to Buber's book - what can I say. Wonderful, a poetic book of the relationship between I and Thou...between each person and others and between each person and the divine. What a poetic book, I was highlighting passage after passage -- it really captures such times and such times in perspective when the relationship is lost too and we spend most of our time somehow related to its in the world (I - it, Buber's other mode), but knowing, partly with his help of this possibility of the Thou/s out there and for us to relate I - Thou, respecting ourselves and respecting the thou of others. A book to b grateful for and to return to. In a way he seemed quite against the idea of God inside us, as many mystics argue, and instead seemed to be suggesting a very hygienic relationship with others and the Other, and this was somehow refreshing and helpful and thought provoking. In that I - Thou relationship i think he'd also argue that we may be enfolded and experience this at our depths. His writing really transported me I felt, reminded me of this real experience and possibility that may give us such meaning

I read his dialogue with Carl Rogers a long time ago and would like to reread this, that was important to me. The story of Buber's questioning and thought stimulated by the traumatic loss of a friend is inspiring. This book seemed quite inspired to me. I also have his collection Between Man and Man and hope I can find time and energy to follow this stimulating reading up soon. A book of life, a book that may save life.


62tonikat
Modifié : Juin 26, 2017, 7:10 am



Blake by Peter Ackroyd

How moving at the end, a wonderful appreciation throughout of William Blake, engraver, poet, artist, visionary, prophet, man, son, husband, being. What a life, what a journey, true to himself.

Ackroyd felt to me to stand alongside Blake, appreciate him, his work, his times. His deep knowledge often illuminating. Many wonderful inspired passages of his own, and quite human, in touch with or respectful of Blake and his beliefs, lauding his consistency, following his turns and returns. Wholly inspirational.

You may notice I have been reading the man himself too, his illuminated books, so viewing them too (see the wonderful Blake Archive too). Ackroyd has also led me further into Blake's engravings, drawing and paintings, that I look forward to exploring more.

I'm not sure I can speak of the poetry just now, I'm staggered and stunned as I meet it in its fullness, and to borrow and adapt from Blake its organisation and minute articulation (whilst organic, never a dry method, though as Ackroyd points out in Blake's consistent interest in The Ancient of Days aware he also maybe saw he was also partly Urizen). But this will, I hope, trust, pray, remain wholly inspirational for me in these methodicalised times.

63tonikat
Juin 24, 2017, 5:03 am



The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

I began this sometime in the last two years or so and got three chapters in. I think I was finding it slow, also I felt I could see where it was going - on the other hand I did stop for some reason just as things, as far as they do, started happening.

The story of a young solder assigned a dead end posting at a fort, away from his city. It studies being over time, the role of habit. In a way it may remind me of Oblomov, a passivity, maybe a poetic to passivity and watching the light pass.

When I picked it up I went back a chapter and it wholly caught me to complete in a few days. Much to remember, not least the feeling it gave of trappedness in time passing, recognitions of stories we tell ourselves as it does - recognitions of what I know of ageing now. And a very beautiful ending, one to remember, a wholeness to it, a rejoining of something beyond the narrative, it might remind me a bit of what I sad of Dickens, in so far as whatever happens somehow he'll find the same.

A beautiful book - it may be easy to relegate it to a stock description, even partly a nightmare, though I had a sense in reading it that much came of observation. It's more than any type I give it, any paring down to what it superficially seems, get beyond that perception, remember and resonate, I shall tell myself if I did start to do that - just as seeing where it was going, was not wrong but it discovered more.

64tonikat
Modifié : Juin 24, 2017, 5:15 am



My Business is to Create: Blake's Infinite writing by Eric G. Wilson

I quite enjoyed this - it gave an overview of Blake's view of creativity, full of many and generous quotations from the man himself, explanation and examples and comparisions. However it suffers by some comparison - firstly it is a brave and difficult thing to do to put your own prose next to Blake's or next to his poetry. Secondly as I was already half way through Ackroyd's biography, which gave a real sense of appreciation of the man from someone standing alongside him in a way and with less of a sense of telling somehow or presenting. At times the tone of this was textbook -- though I should also say that at times he did seem to take off in his prose somewhat himself, which i did enjoy - and he definitely inspired me to reengage with Ackroyd after a pause and with Blake. Wilson definitely understands so much of Blake, explains well -- I think finally, and this may have been unavoidable in such a book that explains this, but it left me feeling the method and world view of Blake in all this, wondering if maybe it was never quite so clear as it presented, but more organic (and lost and rediscovered to the man himself at times, lived with, always evolving, morphing, dying, being reborn) -- again I may be being unfair, and maybe I am not well read enough of Blake, it is a question it has given me to think on as I read more -- and it may be that it had to be so in explaining this in that way. Ackroyd does not do that however. I don't have my copy to hand right now, it makes me want to go back, there was a use in how it pulled together diverse strands, or may I feel a bit like it is cheating?

65tonikat
Modifié : Juin 24, 2017, 7:14 am



Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I've not read this since I was a child and enjoyed it at a sitting recently. I remember as a child getting frustrated with Alice getting bigger and smaller and needing to get through that little door - and may have skipped a bit through it (unusual for me) as I didn't remember that she didn't - on the other hand the rabbit's house was vaguely familiar, but it all has a cobbled together feel in my memory. I do remember reading Through the Looking Glass first for some reason, maybe I read this badly/skipped bits, it's makes more sense (?) to me now. I mean to reread Through the Looking Glass too.

I can identify with Alice somewhat - her curiosity, her focus on what she's been taught and somehow less aware of the feelings of the creatures, that was familiar, as was the ending. Wish I'd processed that awareness of similarity better as a child. I'm interested what Victorians made of that lack of awareness of different sorts of creatures from having been taught wha is right, or maybe certain Victorians, empire builders maybe, of all sorts.

and so searching and learning - this is an interesting introduction/overview of interpretations - http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20160527-alice-in-wonderlands-hidden-messages - I'm curiouser and curiouser, may go deeper, of course.

66thorold
Modifié : Juin 26, 2017, 5:38 am

>65 tonikat: Fun! When I re-read them now (or at least in the last decade or two) the core of the story and the point of most of the jokes seems to be Alice's frustration with her inability to get schoolroom morality, physics and logic to map onto the world she is in. But I think that was far less important when I was a child - I remember struggling to try to reverse-engineer what she would have been taught by her mid-Victorian governess... I've got Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice somewhere - that's worth having, if you want to follow up the true absurdity of Alice-decoding. Probably there are more up to date sources now as well.

I'm enjoying your adventures in Blake! (I thought I had the Ackroyd, but I can't find it - maybe I saw it on my parents' shelves. I do have E.P. Thompson's Witness against the beast, which I haven't read yet, but obviously should...)

67tonikat
Juin 27, 2017, 5:32 pm

I don't have that E. P. Thompson but must try it. I am badly read of him for all my past history reading. (ha past history reading!)

It's funny but that reverse engineer what she'd been taught rings a bell for me too. I think I was anxious when i read it, was also in a hurry, it needed to be approached in the right way. I was anxious reading of Alice as a boy, raised questions, as would any similarity.

68tonikat
Juil 6, 2017, 3:16 pm




A Scattering by Christopher Reid

I do find myself reluctant, perhaps hesitant is a better word, to write about poetry at the moment. For lots of reasons. Partly look at my Alice Oswald review and having seemingly missed mentioning the feminist aspect at first, at least in what I wrote. And that can be al the worse as I make my points nicely. Then those poets I go to classes about may gain from what I have learned - which may also make me all the more aware of how much I don't know. But then like writing a poem, you never do unless you do. Again about tone, and fingers crossed I don't ruin my reputation (let alone anyone else's).

This collection is from Christopher Reid - I think in these waters h was once a Martian poet, but I think that is not so much what this is about. It's well known, won the Costa book award in 2009. It's a collection following the loss of his wife when I think she was just fifty-six. A poet friend of mine recommended it a few years ago and I began but did not click with its beginning section of poems set in Greece after her diagnosis. In my grecophilia maybe it was just too much another English lover of the place, for me. Again reading i this time I had to go with that section a bit, though I grew into it this time. And overall the book really came together - powerful in many parts, yet also subtle, and sometimes not subtle in the way grief never is in how we reencounter it eve when in its midst -- I hope I never forget his poems of losing track and thinking he hears her, and of some of his journey after loss. To say more I need t reread and also let it steep more.

I've read some Seamus Heaney this year, but don't want to say much, if anything abut that - and especially not until I have read all the poems in the Haw lantern and Station Island and read round them more. The class I was at has stopped for now. I've also been reading Blake - but really what can I say -- read him, read of, and think, feel, act.

69tonikat
Juil 22, 2017, 2:10 pm

Well, for a little while there (as ever) I was on a really good reading rate and thought I may haul my personal best this year - now I am back on track for around twenty eight books or so, right on my sort of average. Moving house, and doing so bit by bit as I am, has really broken the flow. But anyway, now over halfway through, some stats.

books read - 14

nationality of authors
British - 6
Mexican - 1
Italian - 1
German - 1
Irish - 1
USA - 1
Italian - 1

dates of publication
1790's - 4
1860's - 1
1920's - 1
1940's - 1
1970's - 1
1990's - 2
2000's - 1
2010's - 3

gender of author

female - 1 (!!!!)
male - 14

Poetry - 8
Poetics / lit criticism/appreciation - 4
fiction - 3
philosophy - 2
biography - 1

(not counting possible transgender as not aware how author would wish to be counted)
I really have to complete more female authors - I am reading a lot of Emily Dickinson, I got over four hundred into the Johnson collected, but on learning for example that she spelled upon as opon for years and some other things Johnson ironed out I have recommenced with Franklin's reading edition, though it has interrupted my flow with it a bit.

I'm unsure these days of adding poetry as complete, ever, as the best (my best, favs) should be open to go back to, never complete really, experienced. I also don't like counting too much, don't do so in my list, only in terms of seeing some stats.

Current reading - I am back at The Prelude, I went back a few books in the 1805 version and have reread up to book 6 at the mo -- staggering but also very much too with Blake in my mind too and comparing them: whatever difference they both believed in the imagination and whatever attachment they may have had to their view in the end maybe there is beyond. I want to get back at The Upanishads as I flew through to about halfway through the collection I have, I faltered at the Thunder I think, or after, maybe I am processing, looked at Eliot too a bit on that. I'd like to complete my Alice diversion with Through the Looking Glass. In the last week I've been reading The Art Spirit by Robert Henri after seeing David Lynch mention it in the film David Lynch: The Art Life - the weird thing is I recognise some of what I have read before, I've seen it or heard it read on tv or radio, all unrecorded except in my heart.

70tonikat
Juil 22, 2017, 2:33 pm

July articles

I read one of his books this year, this is interesting in many ways - may read more by him, lots of similar interests - http://magazine.wfu.edu/2016/06/03/professor-eric-g-wilsons-quest-to-create-his-...

72tonikat
Modifié : Août 21, 2017, 4:33 am

Always, at some point in the year, it is likely you may come to regret your previously possibly witty thread title as vain, self conscious, superficial, a stretch (like anyone really knows why the nougat reference from the year before except for me) -- and then perhaps I am too harsh, and greater titles than any I will ever have have been regretted. So, onwards.

Conjure by Michael Donaghy Kindle ed in Collected Poems, Michael Donaghy

This was a reread - a reread within a year. I came to do this as I began his final, posthumous, collection Safest having read this last year and then left off. And when I came to go back to it went back a bit in Conjure to read my way in again, and back and back again to the start of it. I wrote this about this collection in last year's thread (ooo I never quoted myself on here before I think):

"I like his poems very much and this collection may have been my favourite so far -- although it is some time since I read the others. His poems have great wit, great style. It's funny but that stays with me in lasting impression, but they also have great immediacy and emotion or feeling. I think I really need to dwell on them all more. The poem 'Annie' I was reading in a hotel lounge took me to the brink of crying in public when I first read it - maybe it chimed with my experience. I read the collection fast though - a lot in that sitting in the hotel on arrival. Need to go back more slowly over this and the other collections, when I finish my first read of his posthumous collection. I'd not planned reading this when i did and it really hit the spot when I did."

kat, toni, LibraryThing, Club Read 2016, 'My 2016 search for clarity', post 107.

(Ah the fun, or will it turn vanity, or, no, standing proud for my topic title, owning it.)

But I digress.

I think I wrote a little carefully last year when I wrote this. That wit and style - it is indubitable, formidable and may make me a little wary of voicing this feeling I can have. But when I went back to him I realised again that I can be left with a sense of such proficiency it can hide something more raw about him, something less considered, something that may be what I really seek in poems. I'm saying can he be too sleek, too good. And I'm cautious not least because I really don't know that I am right about this, not to mention saying it of a well loved late poet -- and whom I can find very moving myself.

I think part of it comes from the first poem in the Collected poems, in the collection Shibboleth. It's called 'Machines' and speaks of a balance to the machine (also being work of art)...you can read it here:

http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/machines/

So, much more complex and subtle than my slapdash caricature, yet it sticks with me.

Part of my failure may be my own lack of refinement to the peaks on which he stood - i.e. awareness of words and technique, that as I learn them may reveal more of what is really going on.

And even I know there is a lot going on - a wonderful playfulness and musicality to his poems even as they play in ways I am unsure of. This collection, Conjure, entirely understandably explores some falsity and trickiness to this concept and maybe in that is where I am was unsure at times, and playfulness and wit may feel exposed as just that. I think I remember not especially liking the poem 'Irena of Alexandria' (I see you may read it here - https://rihlajourney.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/irena-of-alexandria-michael-donagh... ) - a poem told from the point of a view of a person she was ensuring was superceded. Almost a bit like my distaste for Wolf Hall there. And in that then surely whatever I think of how it is done, with wit and technique, ultimately perhaps that is a challenge for my humanity and ability to forgive.

But I love Donaghy when he speaks personally (*). Again I loved 'Annie'. A poem I will not ruin with too many words. When I say I could have cried, I could have wept as it hit me and again this time. As I think of it I think of Dylan Thomas 'Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter', and Blake, and death. There are other poems of personal lyricism in this collection, gems.

I think my difficulty may be in not yet fully getting the man, to know his voice, not all of it as such, which may massage away the bumps in my reading, help me hear the tone where I'm not sure. All poets must remember to be generous understanders of others - especially where they themselves fail - and undoubtedly Donaghy does not fail. I'd like more of my personal fix...but then all poets must learn they must make their own, or try to (and deny the auto interest implied, perhaps even denying it in what they write). I've read some of his prose too, am stalled in that, maybe this is all part of a working out - his poetics seems precise, just too smart maybe, I can veer away from that, but it just may be I don't yet quite understand how he was free and dancing beyond that, master of his own ways as he surely was in the collections I have read. Now I've written this I must try again to get beyond my simplistic memory of reading him, to challenge that, people are always more and I know he was, amply here as a poet.

edit - (*) and maybe I am wrong not to hear him speaking personally throughout, maybe that is it. Well we all are moving, balancing.

73deebee1
Août 21, 2017, 8:42 am

Tonikat, I don't know how I missed this thread, though I admit I've been visiting LT much less this year. Maybe it was the nougat reference? :-) Not a big fan here, but it made me think of saccharine, syrupy narratives and fluff. Glad to find your thread is anything but. Enjoyed reading your random thoughts and digressions. And the not-so-random ones, of course.

74tonikat
Août 22, 2017, 4:24 pm

>73 deebee1: thanks deebee :) there be golden nougats in them there nougat seams, its a sticky business though.

75deebee1
Août 29, 2017, 5:00 am

there be golden nougats in them there nougat seams, its a sticky business though

Love that!

76tonikat
Sep 1, 2017, 5:14 pm

>75 deebee1: :)



I've completed more of my move this week - as it all happened suddenly this was first chance to move the bulk of my books. It's a strange experience having your library pass through your hands like that (or was for me who had not moved for a long time) - it made me question for a moment having so many books in this world. And also wonder on why I have so many (which is totally unlike me, I mean that is fundamentally questioning, maybe too much). It gave me lots of other thoughts and a decision to cull a bit more, when I get the time.

Reading has been unsettled. I'm hoping to focus more on my currently reading label and polish off a few in the next few weeks. I'm not getting far with my current focus at the top.

I have been reading some Kafka short stories in the collection I have - led me to order a collected stories by him, and this one translated by the Muirs. It has opened him up to me better. I'll save my speculations until I have read more. But I'm well enthused - and especially after Janouch's book last year.



Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe



I started and read this in the last month or so I think, finishing last night. I was recommended it by someone who knew of my recent Blake reading.

This is a series of chapters that take titles or lines from Blake and weave their meaning for Oe into his life, especially his life with his son, whom, at least in the fiction of the book, he was aiming to write this for, for his twentieth birthday. (I'm having a beer and refuse to rewrite that sentence for those commas, let's just go with it.)

Sometime about eight or nine years ago I read Oe's short story Aghwee the sky monster and remembered how much I enjoyed his tone and style. So I could not say no to this volume as a chance to get to know his writing better.

Much of Oe's fiction relates his relationship to his son (I understand). I should point out in the afterword the translator is keen to point out that whilst Oe uses real events as basis that he fictionalises this. That in itself may be fascinating - early in this greater exposure to him I wondered if he may have influenced Knausgaard (whom I have not read much of at all, yet, but who I understand does not fictionalise as much (? then again am not sure I am right there?)) and later I wondered if Oe was bending his imaginative space-time to some fuller truer sense, poetically, artfully. Whatever, I find his approach very satisfying.

His son, who is known by his childhood nickname of Eeyore in most of this book, was born differently abled. I will not explain in more detail, as to learn more of this is part of the book. I have A Personal Matter to read next which I understand deals with the powerful events in his son's early life and at least the fictional Oe's reaction. Eeyore in this book does not speak for some years but then comes to through bird song -- and goes on to develop musically (loving Bach and Mozart) and to compose, whilst attending special education.

Getting to know of Eeyore and his family I found quite wonderful - something that challenged me and causes me to re-find humanity -- and that seems just what his father (fictional and authorial) is about (challenging himself not least, though in many ways his love for his son stands out and beyond challenge here). Add to that his weaving in and out comments on Blake and ways in which he finds Blake's relevance to them and, well, he had me at 'Songs of . . . '.

It is fascinating - and I think something of a trend in literature at the moment - to read of another's reaction to literature (hey, it's us!). This is such an account of the highest standard and fascinating to read congruences and similarities in his reaction to Blake to my own and the steps ahead of me he may have been, and also simply his vast reckoning of the achievement of Blake and the particular resonances for him in Blake to his own life -- and also, am I even right to say this, but maybe Oe as imaginative enthusiast also present, I had a sense of that at some point towards the end and just loved it - Nobel laureate as fan and also real reader of another, not academically without error, above. Oe is very open about his own possible earlier misreading of Blake in another book he'd written.

Oe also speaks of hoping to provide his son with a book of definitions he may understand and so the book has a flavour at times of explaining aspects of life - but this is something that seems in some ways beyond Oe, and beyond him to do so in a way that perhaps makes sense for his son, whilst at the same time it is wholly succeeding at making sense, and I have a sense that age range for readers is almost not relevant, that the wholeness of it somehow would show through and its honesty is what was somehow needed. It seems very generous in this technique, using personal matters, with his readers and also truly respectful of them, to simply tell what he sees and leave it to the listener/reader to take what they need.

I have the strangest feeling I have seen a documentary about Oe before or heard him speak of this book or heard it spoken of. The events of a school musical and also about his Rain Tree I am sure rang a dim bell of having touched my interest long ago. Maybe I should look back to see if there was a South Bank Show or some such thing, it'd make sense given his Nobel.

It has energised me, now I have a desk again, to get back to reading those weighty Blake tomes but also more Oe and also to try more Nobel winners.

77tonikat
Modifié : Août 27, 2018, 11:57 am



Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

A quick read, yet one that is hard to skim as it often stopped me to think. Still it only took a day or two. Well, I say that. In fact I once got part way through this a long time ago, sometime in the nineties, am unsure when. May see if it is noted in a diary at the time. I've always wanted to write I think and he says many interesting things about how necessary a work of art really is and also whether writing is a necessity for a person -- I answered this (then) as unsure, I could see living without writing then, unfortunately in my confusion then I did not see how necessary it could be to helping me through my confusion, as it has proved since -- (edit 27/8/18 - and underestimated my own interest, misunderstood my need). This is maybe why I drifted from it then - that and I do find there are parts that can be hard to follow as he is clearly responding to his correspondent and you have to figure that part a bit at times, and maybe as a young person I saw those links in ellipsis or felt them less clearly.

But it is wonderful writing, many passages of lucid lyricism to take to heart - his faith in personal discovery through what he terms as solitude. Though it does make me think that this is what his letters are denying his correspondent in some way - no matter how gentle they are. It could be part of the reason I gave up previously was to try to find my own way. But beautiful and highly illuminating of Rilke and his view of art and life - revealed as a powerful poet of a high order (I've hardly read him). It's funny but reading Oe recently muse on how Blake was relevant to his particular life, reading this now I can also have that sense for me of this - which makes me note how powerful it can be to share such ideas, and how impossible it may be to ever make what we mean totally clear (something Rilke when knew and he tries only to point to this young man). I was prompted to pick it up again having read of thorold's recent reading and may turn to the poetry I have again soon.

It's strange but reading things like this the argument is hard to stick with me, I'll remember it as I go back to it - and some points do stick - as previously his advice on solitude and seeking our own answers in it, on the necessity of art and the question of how necessary is it to us to write, they stuck previously, though I had quite forgotten it, or chimed with things I half sensed. But it is hard to remember the whole narrative, some things I can do that with, but things like this it can be hard to do that I find. I do think the necessity question might have more said of it and how he meant that (grumble grumble? again maybe it is framed as it is partly due to how it has come up for his correspondent Mr Kappus whose letters are not at least in my copy). So I will return to it I am sure, there are passages I'm tempted to write out myself. But also it prompts me to think on my own responses. And maybe for things like that it is very hard to follow the argument when its argument is situated in the particular then, we can only take what is general from it, points, and relate them to our particular.

78tonikat
Modifié : Sep 7, 2017, 7:04 pm



Bill's New Frock by Anne Fine



I was browsing children's fiction for presents and was reminded of this and in a reverie of what it may have been like to have such fiction when I was little I bought it and read it today. It was published in 1989, so a bit late for me. But then I am not sure in some ways about it - maybe it does not entirely speak to me, whilst it does offer a glimmer, or would have.

Bill wakes up one morning to discover he's become a girl. He's referred to as 'he' throughout the book and he clearly does not wish this change -- let alone his mother breezily greeting him and getting him into said frock for the day, with barely a by or leave, no choice of course. And the frock, of course is pink and frilly. Bill by the way is primary school age, though I think his exact age is unspecified.

So, off Bill has to go to school -- and a day ensues that is the real point of this book I think - in which he is treated totally differently based on this superficial difference of the frock (not a word said about any change of gender). Simply accepted as a person wearing a frock - whistled at instead of accosted by bullies, patted on the head, given girls reading materials, excluded from football (!!), forced model for a painting in pink class, not allowed to lift anything heavy, expected to keep neat and tidy, not to win races -- in short treated to the social expectations foisted on so many girls. This seems the point of the book - or maybe it has many points - opening eyes to this from many perspectives. And the emphasis on girls to just put up with it - there is a knowing comment about putting up with it and waiting and seeing, which seemed a broad brush stroke that gave a binary approach to activity and passivity. And none of the other girls in Bill's class wear a frock at all, but dodge what that seems to bring with trousers.

In the end there is a "happy ending" and Bill is back to the Bill he wants (which yes, must be a good thing) - though exactly what that means you may wonder - could Bill be female to male? a tomboy? does it matter? No.

I suppose I ask as one point of view does seem missed - the boy, or anyone, who would not have minded, at least to have the choice occasionally to wear a dress etc. What is depicted would have been a dream come true for a minority of the human population. Now I get many will feel they were never given a choice and had to wear a frock - and I'm with you on that, that needs to eb a choice - but then there are others who not only do not get a choice, but that wish for a choice in itself is taboo and generally seen as nonsensical. I don't know in the end about this book - it is very skilful and enjoyable, I recognised UK primary school class life -- but is not quite the story I'd have needed, and in fact in its conclusion closes the hope it may have raised, as we learn Bill does not have to do this again. Or not that but Bill himself is not seizing this opportunity as it would seem to me. Maybe that's fine for Bill, a good thing. I think I'll learn a bit more of trans children's fiction, see what I make of it. I always avoided The Boy in the Dress, but that is next, I'm not a fan of Walliams' adult comedy.

There was one other aspect - and again this may be a reason this is not a trans book, or at least not male to female - and that was the total acceptance of everyone that Bill goes to school in a dress - even the bully only whistles, accepting that role. If only it was so straightforward to make such a change. Maybe that gives a clue about Bill? But this does allow the difference in traditional gender role and treatment to be shown. Maybe anything else would not be for this age group - though I wonder what a boy that wished to wear a dress would make of the conclusion, hopes dashed perhaps.

In the past I always thought I may be jealous of trans children, the opportunity they may get now (though I know that is often far from easy, even if they do get some choice), but now as this has become more visible in recent years, television documentaries, all I feel for those young people is really, really very happy for them to be able to be themselves more to learn what they want whilst loved and free. Not having to just sit and wait and see, unable to express themselves in any way for social reasons that haven't the wit to see what is in front of their nose, or do not care about it.

79lilisin
Sep 8, 2017, 3:50 am

>76 tonikat:

I've decided to continue moving my library as long as I still feel like doing it and it still gives me satisfaction. But they day I get annoyed I think I'll have no problem just selling all of it to the used book store.

80tonikat
Sep 8, 2017, 4:50 am

>79 lilisin: - a wise decision - mine never annoyed me, just made me question it, it felt unethical for a moment, to have so many books when I thought about the wide world. It also made me self conscious of them, they are now, most of them, in a room that can be seen into by passers by, depending how I adjust the blinds, whereas before they were totally un-overlooked. I also wondered why I have so many by different authors and don't have all i want of the authors I love, and made me wonder why I am reading so widely when I do try and focus on those authors. I felt a bit like a dragon who'd moved her treasure horde and questioned it, nearer the townsfolk, why not just try and fit in. But I feel better - and maybe it was as I have not moved for so long - but it did lead me to change my attitude to my books a bit, or refresh it - yours sounds very healthy.

81tonikat
Modifié : Sep 10, 2017, 4:03 pm



The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams

When I began posting on LT, in this my 10 year anniversary, I'd have never thought I'd be reading nevermind posting about children's fiction. Still less that I'd be reading much, never mind posting about (!) gender issues. How things change.

A nice thing about this book, especially as it is for children is that it does not mine the idea of gender issues at all - it just presents a continuum of interests and how arbitrarily some of those are denied to some for reason of gender, by others. So, Dennis in this story has a genuine interest in fashion and has the good fortune to meet a girl two years older with a heart of gold who helps -- a woman that may be a model of understanding and warmth of heart.

At first I was unsure about the tone Walliams took - reader, addressing you (and as I've said I don't always enjoy his humour) -- but, reader, it came to work as he was sincere whilst never stodgy, humorous with it and I am certain for any boys reading this a very good thing to have someone on side.

The story develops nicely - paying attention to traditionally developed male interests Dennis has and very lightly allowing exploration of not so much discovery of this side of himself as its validation and release with the help of his friend, Lisa. Oh that a person in such need have such good fortune. It is of course not an easy path - but it is one that also allows for growth and understanding of the world and allows that sliver of possible good will that can be there to begin to grow into a tree of life. I'd certainly be interested to read of what comes for Dennis (/Denise). Maybe as he grows the tone of the books could mature too.

I'm amazed at myself reading contemporary children's fiction. But entirely unplanned there has been something very satisfying in it - scenarios and possibilities that were so impossible they were not worth thinking on somehow made possible, understood and honoured. Something missing - still missing, but addressed in the tone of those times. I'm happy to have read it. I came across by a chance a meme that is about apparently about how (I don't remember it word for word) but how a facet of gay (which is different from gender issues!) but a facet of lgbt culture is to live your teenage years as a 30 year old (or older!) as they were impossible when younger -- and find what I am saying above fits me right into that, quite to my surprise. I thought I was avoiding too many fashion mistakes in the well known teenage style learning t women go through. And if anything would very much like to avoid all things teen, unless I were youthful again. But no, it seems unavoidable. But I drift from the books. I did read more Kafka today too. Very different. Hmm maybe my own tone becomes a bit too 'reader, I wore it'.

82thorold
Sep 14, 2017, 12:26 pm

>78 tonikat: >81 tonikat: - Yes, fascinating to think what it might have been like had there been books like those around "in our day". Unanswerable, of course, but you can't help asking the question...

I think the key thing is probably not that kids who are growing up feeling that they're "different" have access to those books (those impossible scenarios somehow always seem to be available to the imagination, even without books), but more that they have the chance to grow up in a world where their "normal" contemporaries are open to reading about gender and sexuality and - presumably - also to discuss those topics without sniggering or beating anybody up.

83tonikat
Sep 14, 2017, 6:12 pm

>82 thorold: that would be A Very Good Thing imo. It sometimes seems exactly what some do not want. Let us hope for developing outbreaks of mutual understanding and maybe even, one day, world peace.

85tonikat
Modifié : Nov 4, 2017, 5:30 pm

Somehow my focus is less on reading at the mo - I have been reading a bit, just not whole books, Jung, Heaney other bits and pieces. It feels ok as well - and will just have to be. A bit of writing done too, and lots of thinking, adjusting and doing more Katie style. And this terms films are Russian, has been fantastic so far, part two starts tonight.

November articles

This explains a lot I think - and far beyond Hollywood https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/03/the-courageous-unpopular-activism...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/04/brexit-ministers-spy-russia-uk-...

86tonikat
Modifié : Nov 12, 2017, 4:45 am



Station Island by Seamus Heaney

I'm drafting this with the book held only in memory and physically elsewhere. I may revise for specifics later. But just feel like trying to work out an overview for myself and also come back to my quite stagnant thread.

In the early 1970's Seamus Heaney left Northern Ireland amongst the Troubles, felt he had to, but carried them of course in his concerns.

I've been reading him chronologically and joined a group earlier this year doing the same, with a very good teacher. We resumed a few weeks ago and reflected some more on Station Island which we covered in the Spring as a refresher before moving to The Haw Lantern. I'd not read through all of Station Island myself, I have now.

In general the book is divided into three parts, the first of typically Heaney poems (which of his poems is not somehow), a selection as I remember it, lyrical - some concerned with the Troubles, some with his journey amidst that and relation to them, and also not only in that context, and also with some more directly affected and some on apparently other themes, for example Chekov on Sakhalin, also amidst trouble.

The second part of the book is called Station Island, a sequence of poems that follows a pilgrimage he made as an adult to Station Island on Lough Derg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Patrick%27s_Purgatory) A sequence of strong self questioning on his faith, or not, and meeting a range of ghostly figures, the last James Joyce who gives him wonderful advice on finding his way (see below).

The final section - Sweeney Redivivius - are not translation, but what Heaney calls glosses based on the Sweeney character that he also translated - figure of Irish myth transformed to a bird.

There is clearly an aspect of searching to this collection - of fragmentation or some confusion perhaps, maybe loss of direction or sense of it and reassessment...searching in Catholicism and elsewhere. Not finding any easy answers, or allowing them or even his own need to grasp them. As he moves through Station Island I had a strange feeling that whilst he was saying he wasn't getting his answers, he was in fact deeply in exactly the process that may be hoped for, writing of visions whilst at the Stations, examining himself, it made me think of Catholicism and Reformation. He does not find his answer there and seems to commit to seeking it another way after Joyce's words:

" '. . . You are raking at dead fires,

a waste of time for somebody your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod's game,
infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing.Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'
. . . "

So a commitment to his own way, to seek it, take it. and so to Sweeney Redivivus (I read this as reborn). Which starts to try to do this - But then does not find it easily there in the final sequence.This was probably my favourite part of the book - though in the end what he seems to hope to find is dust in the font of life:

" . . .
I would meditate
that stone-faced vigil

until the long dumbfounded
spirit broke cover
to raise a dust
in the font of exhaustion."

So, whilst searching, still not exactly hopeful for what is there, what may be found, what is felt or may be felt, arid.

I should also read (or is it reread the interview on this book in Stepping Stones, maybe I will have to revise further - and maybe I should not read this process I'm sensing too directly or simplistically. There are a wealth of other tones and aspects to this book, of course. I was struck by a sense that whilst he is writing of a search that is incomplete he was still managing to write beautiful poetry. I associate such poetry, of finding it as a kind of completion in itself, present in the moment, recognising where he is, a rich moment -- so I find a paradox in that for his search, yet do not doubt him in that he still felt in need. I find that a very interesting thought, that for all those fruits, apparent, there was something more needed - and whilst it is doubted and out of grasp a faith it is there I think, whilst that faith at the same time so in question, yet needed, distanced.

One aspect to this process, this book, struck me as a reexamination of some of his own previous writing and also relation to other writers and to critics and to himself - the pressures, goals, achievements, dynamics of his work which in that period of moving had become freelance and full time professional as a writer.

I need to spend more time with The Haw Lantern, which I think I love more than any of the collections I have read so far -- and in which my general sense wonders, feels, this process moves further in in a way I find deeply satisfying, human and wonderful. A huge theme of this next collection being of course writing and language too.

(edited finally to add the quotations and rejig a bit, apologies for the half baked posting without them)

87tonikat
Modifié : Jan 1, 2018, 11:19 am

It was a mistake posting the above before I could finalise it and add the quotations. It's still partial. There are poems in that first section that I could talk about, would enjoy doing so. And the Station island sequence, which in fact it is sometime since I read.

It led me also to review my cinema and tv list for this year, very little theatre. And well, it is not exactly time to review the year, but for me, as usual there is more on this list than my reading. Not that my reading has been poor in any way, and there is far more of it than posted finished things - I may try posting a bit of thoughts in process of some reading. But here is my list - I hope yet to make my hundred films.

~ Mozart in the Jungle s1. re-viewing
~ Jason Bourne
~ The Naked Island d. Kaneto Shindo (11/1/17)
~ Oblivion d. Joseph Kosinski (14/1/17)
~ Mozart in the Jungle s2. re-viewing
~ Letter from an Unknown Woman (20/1/17) d. Max Ophuls. Cinema
~ Snow White and the Huntsman d. Rupert Sanders, 21/1/17
~ Onibaba d. Kaneto Shindo, 21/1/17
~ Mozart in the Jungle s3. 22-23/1/17 re-viewing
~ Moonrise Kingdom d. Wes Anderson. 25/1/17
~ Smiles of a Summer Night d. Ingmar Bergman 27/1/17. Cinema re-viewng
~ The Monuments Men d. George Clooney
~ Haywire d. Steven Soderburgh
~ The River Wild d Curtis Hanson (29/1/17) re-viewing
~ Now you see me d. Louis Leterrier (29/1/17)
~ Frances Ha d. Noah Baumbach (30/1/17)
~ Author: the J. T. LeRoy Story d. Jeff Feuerzeig (1/2/17)
~ Lola d. Jaques Demy (3/2/17) Cinema
~ Partie de campagne d. Jean Renoir (4/2/17)
~ Marriage Italian Style d. Vittorio di Sica (10/2/17) Cinema
~ The Conformist d. Bernardo Bertolucci (11/2/17) re-viewing
~ 127 hours d. Danny Boyle (12/2/17)
~ Loves of a Blonde d. Milos Forman (17/2/17) Cinema
~ Black Mountain Poets w & d. Jamie Adams (18/2/17)
~ La Ronde d. Max Ophuls (25/2/17) re-viewing
~ Arrival d. Denis Villeneuve (6/3/17)
~ The Lovers of the Arctic Circle (17/3/17) d. Julio Medem. Cinema
~ Lucy d. Luc Besson (18/3/17)
~ Elysium (19/3/17)
~ Seymour: An Introduction d. Ethan Hawke (20/3/17)
~ In the Mood for Love d. Wong Kar-Wai (24/3/17) Cinema
~ Paula Rego: Secrets and Stories tv (25/3/17)
~ In the Mood for Love d. Wong Kar-Wai (25/3/17) re-viewing
~ The Importance of Being Earnest d. Anthony Asquith
~ No d. Pablo Larrain (30/3/17)
~ Blue Eyelids d. Ernesto Contreras. (31/3/17) Cinema
~ Wild Ireland tv
~ A Quiet Passion d. Terence Davies (7/4/17) Cinema
~ Neruda d. Pablo Larrain (7/4/17) Cinema
~ Paterson d. Jim Jarmusch (8/4/17) re-viewing
~ Neruda d. Pablo Larrain (12/4/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ The Book Thief d. Brian Percival (15/4/17)
~ Dean Spanley d. Toa Fraser (21/4/17)
~ North by Northwest d. Alfred Hitchcock (23/4/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ Carol d. Todd Haynes (29/4/17)
~ The Theory of Everything d. (30/4/17)
~ Seven Samurai d. Akira Kurosawa (1/5/17) Cinema 35mm
~ The Heiress d. William Wyler (5/5/17) Cinema
~ Rashomon d. Akira Kurosawa (7/5/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ The Bourne Legacy re-viewing
~ All about Eve d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (19/5/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ talk on Kurosawa with tony rayns (20/5/17) cinema
~ Kagemusha d. Akira Kurosawa (23/5/17) cinema
~ A Place in the Sun d. George Stevens (26/5/17) Cinema
~ Hinterland series, tv
~ A Song for Marion w & d. Paul Andrew Williams (29/5/17)
~ Le Havre d. Aki Kaurismaki (2/6/17)
~ John Wick (6/6/17)
~ The Duke of Burgundy w & d. Peter Strickland (6/6/17)
~ To Catch a Thief d. Alfred Hitchcock (23/6/17) re-viewing
~ Cardinal tv series
~ Arrival d. Denis Villeneuve re-viewing
~ Vertigo d. Alfred Hitchcock (30/6/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ Knight of Cups d. Terrence Malick (2/7/17)
~ The Sting d. George Roy Hill (7/7/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ The Seasons in Quincy: Four portraits of John Berger d. Bartek Dziadosz, Colin MacCabe, Christoper Roth, Tilda Swinton (10/7/17) Cinema
~ The Man Who Would be King (14/7/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ David Lynch: The Art Life d. Cinema (15/7/17)
~ Volver d. Pedro Almodovar (21/7/17) re-viewng
~ Moonlight d. Barry Jenkins (22/7/17)
~ Top of the Lake: China Girl tv
~ Bullitt d. Peter Yates (4/8/17) re-reviewing
~ A Canterbury Tale (6/8/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ Accidental Anarchist (18/8/17) tv
~ Tokyo Story d. Yasujiro Ozu (2/9/17)
~ Twin Peaks: the Return d. David Lynch tv. (-5/9/17)
~ X+Y d. Morgan Matthews (9/9/17)
~ Broken d. Rufus Norris (10/917)
~ Field of Dreams re-viewing
~ Bande a part d. Jean-luc Godard (15/9/17) re-viewing
~ Good Kill d. Andrew Niccol
~ The Cranes are Flying d. Mikhail Kalatzov (22/9/17) Cinema
~ Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse d. Agnes Varda 23/9/17) Cinema
~ Listen to Britain d. Humphrey Jennings & Stewart Mcallister
~ Listen to Britain 2017 various
~ Ballad of a Soldier d. Grigoriy Chukhray (29/9/17) Cinema
~ Ivan's Childhood d. Andrei Tarkovsky (6/10/17) Cinema re-reviewng
~ Commissar d. Aleksandr Askoldov (13/10/17) Cinema
~ Wild d. Jean-Marc Vallee (14/10/17)
~ The World's Fastest Indian (15/10/17) re-viewing
~ The Girl on the Train (18/10/17)
~ Come and See d. E. Klimov (20/10/17) Cinema
~ You've Changed w & performed by Kate O'Donnell, Theatre (1/11/17)
~ Burnt by the Sun d. Nikita Mikhalkov (3/11/17) Cinema
~ Of Freaks and Men d. Aleksey Balabanov (10/11/17) Cinema
~ The Florida Project d. Sean Baker (12/11/17) Cinema
~ The Return d.Andrey Zvyagintsev (17/11/17) Cinema
~ How I Ended This Summer d. Aleksey Popogrebskiy (24/11/17) Cinema
~ Persona d. Ingmar Bergman (26/11/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ Cowboys and Aliens d. (26/11/17)
~ Girl, Interrupted (27/11/17) partial re-viewing
~ Taken 3 unreal (28/11/17)
~ Leviathan d. Andrey Zvyagintsev (1/12/17) Cinema re-viewing
~ Detectorists season 3. tv :)
~ Fanny and Alexander d. Ingmar Bergman, 3 hour version, re-viewing (15/12/17)
~ Big Miracle d. Ken Kwapis (22/12/17)
~ Goodbye Lenin! d. Wolfgang Becker (22/12/17)
~ The Cranes are Flying d. Mikhail Kalatzov (23/12/17) re-viewing
~ Kingsman: the secret service
~ The Rainmaker
~ A Few Good Men
~ Ex Machina
~ Sunshine on Leith
~ The Rewrite

I hardly know where to begin in talking about this list - so many incredible movies I feel lucky to have seen. Currently in a season of Russian ad Soviet films that has been awesome. But where to begin - I couldn't even pick out ten favourites, there'd be far too many...but if I really really had to pick out those that somehow live with me most, and having to be very harsh, I'm arguing myself already, in dropping an initial list of nearly 30 (and dropping things seen before), but maybe this will help me hone this further in reviewing the year.

The Naked Island
Arrival
The Lovers of the Arctic Circle
Seymour an Introduction
In the Mood for Love
Wild Ireland (tv series)
Neruda
Le Havre
The Duke of Burgundy
Knight of Cups
Tokyo Story
The Cranes are Flying
Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse
Commissar
Come and See
Burnt by the Sun
Of Freaks and Men
The Florida Project
The Return
How I Ended This Summer
Detectorists season 3

88dchaikin
Nov 12, 2017, 12:39 pm

Catching up from a long way off, Toni. Enjoyed working through your thread. And I’m glad you added those quotes to the Heaney review, which I found fascinating. I tried reading Heaney once and was baffled. Someone suggested I read his earlier stuff first to get a sense of where he was coming from. I didn’t really know what to make of that, but your review gives me more of a sense of what that means.

89tonikat
Modifié : Nov 13, 2017, 8:24 am

>88 dchaikin: Thanks Dan - I don't know his later stuff as well, yet. I find it hard to imagine him as hard to get, but maybe he is a lot closer to home for me. I do find he seems to speak very directly to me. But I have also been listening to him for quite a while now, and have also read some interviews with him and some of his wonderful prose on poetry and poets, to feel where he is coming from.

We've moved onto Seeing Things now. The Haw Lantern was wonderful, we completed that today - our teacher was pointing out that he moves from ideas of digging into his/the past (quite literally at times) in his early work into exploring philosophical ideas and relating them to the everyday -- and I think for me he has a turn I associate with Reformation, of making these ideas and questions of faith, belief, what-is very personal for himself. So I find him a richly rewarding poet -- well trained as he is in ideas and literature and yet asking himself personal questions as a human being who is open to the richness of his own background, has a part of identity that was not steeped in the academic and intellectual heights he found, quite different, that feels to me like it then opens up in a human way (which I associate very much with him) a way that brings back to ground exactly what the point of all that high fallutin' culture is for anyway. Somehow this speaks to me in my slightly different background that has some similarity in feeling a bit like I fall between some of the labels of the world.

There is a very wonderful television programme he made, that doesn't seem all that well known called 'Something to Write Home about' which I find very helpful in thinking about him - and which highlighted to me how he felt he fell between some of the geography of his culture. And also, beside his own writing, the interviews in Stepping Stones have also helped me. I wonder if they'd help. I've been glad to have confirmed to me in recent years that there is a line of thought that to read a poet it is helpful to also read and learn about their life. My learning such things is opening up a lot for me.

90tonikat
Nov 14, 2017, 4:15 pm

^ did that sound patronising? I'm doing that a bit sharing stuff about me projecting onto another's issue. Mostly I just recommend him, I find him very rewarding.

91lilisin
Nov 14, 2017, 10:17 pm

>87 tonikat:

One cannot watch In the Mood for Love and not put it immediately on the favorite list. I watch that year every year and every time I'm equally as entranced by the music, the feel, the costume, the story.

92tonikat
Modifié : Nov 15, 2017, 12:45 pm

>91 lilisin: I totally agree with that. Good to hear from you.

93tonikat
Modifié : Nov 16, 2017, 3:07 am

I just realised - having celebrated my ten years with LT earlier this year -- but just realised that I've now passed ten years of threads about my reading. I think the first one dated from August '07 when it began by summarising my reading since I'd joined LT in March that year. The first two years on the 50 book challenge (still to be met successfully, grrr). But then here on CR threads.

So a moment of nostalgia.

I did keep some reading notes earlier in life (wish I had done so more, I was sliding).

A lot has changed (and is changing...and wasn't even thinking of gender, but) - and my total number of books read feels low compared to others (back on topic). But then I feel the quality, they've meant a lot. And its gone hand in hand with my own poetry developing in ways I would not have dreamt of, sometimes getting out of my own way with that (most often not), published and awaiting publication (don't hold your breaths -- it's not something I chase much, just occasionally).

Interesting to notice this at a time I come back to the thread again, and the group. A Good Thing.

I said before, but thanks to all the contributors, and those missed. We have marked Rebecca's passing. I miss Zeno too. And some commenters who don't drop by nowadays it seems. But very happy for all who do - and any lurkers who don't comment.

94dchaikin
Nov 15, 2017, 9:08 pm

Happy anniversary Toni. Ten years!!

>90 tonikat: patronizing? No, not even slightly. An interesting post.

95tonikat
Nov 16, 2017, 3:07 am

>94 dchaikin: thanks Dan.

And I'm glad about that.

96chlorine
Nov 16, 2017, 11:34 am

>93 tonikat:
Happy anniversary!

Ten years of threads is a terrific thing to have!

97tonikat
Nov 18, 2017, 3:20 am

>96 chlorine: thanks Clémence, it does feel good, literally a thread running through life, like a river to morph the metaphor, an important river for me too. Maybe i will even read back through them all when (if it feels like) we get to the holidays.

98chlorine
Nov 18, 2017, 4:04 am

It should be really interesting if you read your previous threads! I very recently skimmed through my 2015 thread and was really glad I did. I was pleasantly surprised by the insight it brought back. And this was only two years ago! I can't imagine what going through a ten year old thread must be like. :)

I have a list of all the books I've read in the last ten years or so, but it's nothing compared to a thread here.

99tonikat
Nov 18, 2017, 4:48 am

They live in our hearts. Thread or no. Sometimes even despite what we say we know. And if we let them they find their way to what we need them to be.

100chlorine
Nov 18, 2017, 12:28 pm

>90 tonikat:
That's a beautiful thought.

I'm trying to keep a journaling habit (very short notes about the important events of the day) and I wonder if writing down events, even if I never go and read my journals again (I very seldom do it), does not help to mark down in my mind the importance of events. Force me to pay attention. I wonder if this could be similar (at least for me) for threads such as this. This can be seen as a kind of journaling about books...

101tonikat
Nov 18, 2017, 3:12 pm

I see it very similarly and am a big believer in such journalling.

102thorold
Nov 19, 2017, 6:43 am

Congratulations on passing the decade of reading threads! (Hmm - I could have phrased that better, but you know what I mean. The decade of reading threads would be a great title for an off-beat novel, wouldn't it? Something about Norns, probably.)

I've also been surprised to discover how much keeping a public journal makes me see what I'm reading in a different way, and sometimes exposes a bit of structure in what I choose to pursue that I wouldn't necessarily notice otherwise.

I'm impressed by your list of films! I don't keep track of what I watch at home, but looking back at my private journal I see that it's a year since I last went to see a film in a cinema. I'm not doing much better on concerts, either (I've been averaging about four a year...).

Heaney is a poet I admire very much for his technique but find it quite difficult to engage with emotionally. He probably has a better sense of the tools of the English language and how to handle them than any other modern poet, but somehow I've never read anything of his that makes me want to learn it by heart or have it read at my funeral.

103tonikat
Modifié : Nov 19, 2017, 6:35 pm

>102 thorold: thank you. The decade of reading treads could be a really dull police procedural about forensic analysis of tyre tracks, shoe prints, that morphs into David Foster Wallace territory? Norns or Norms? If "Norns" then please let me know what they are? Or am I being slow?

but then the decade of reading threads may have been volume I of Penelope's diaries -- this whole possibility is in fact becoming exciting. Or maybe even a rewriting of the Book of Changes for the tailoring market? subtitled, 'how I looked at what I sewed and discovered my fortune'. And another mistype could give us the decade of reading the reads after a spell checker got at it and all meta and postmodern...it may even have started as some tailor's account of his encounter with The Book of Changes and became instead something else that found him a home in a Borgesian Library and at the same time trapped in his own text and trying to make sense of his own reading within it with a LT thread on his reading . . . and from that he wakes from this dream to find where he has sown himself to is not much different but now he knows it, is.

I have not had any alcohol. (or anything.)

It looks like I go to the cinema a lot, but mostly they are my film group which meets in a room at a cinema and gets a room-sized-wall projection. But still a lot bigger than a tv.

Your comment about Heaney has me thinking. He has all of being a poet but he doesn't make pronouncements maybe, although there is an oracular side he sometimes references. He is too sharp for that maybe, maybe he had to be. He speaks to me emotionally and wisely. And maybe from himself? Which may be what limits his pronouncements, as not so much part of his method? If that's the sort of lines you were on? Must try and marshal my thoughts on The Haw Lantern, I don't think I ever did about Field Work and would have to reread to get there again.

104tonikat
Nov 19, 2017, 6:49 pm

You know what - I looked up Norns -- now I know. Remember Kat, check references before pressing post.

105tonikat
Modifié : Déc 10, 2017, 5:48 pm

>103 tonikat:, >104 tonikat: Not my finest hour maybe.

Onwards.



The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney

I've been reading Heaney's poetry over the last few years. I started to read him the summer he later died. I'd only read him in small parts before that and listened to him speak, (on tv / radio etc), which as with certain poets and artists I found hugely engaging. This collection is my favourite of all so far, high praise.

It's a further movement in him in directions I (at least) think I see and feel. It flows from the developments of Station Island I think in working to a lyrical self expression, especially honestly, perhaps beyond expectations and pressures. It feels it's a journey in finding himself perhaps, man and poet, to find his best somehow - and to think he was still searching like this having produced work as he had I find inspiring, humbling and real. It was also informed in this by having perhaps left behind the context of his childhood religious background - whilst informed by all that learning but having asked himself something personal. I find that a kind of personal Reformation or maybe informed by Counter Reformation.

But then there is more - the book traces a lifetimes of engagement with and interest in words and language, beginning with early recollections and lessons as to these wonders, tracing the ground and informed by this theme throughout and ending, I think, with a poem which, for me, puts writing, language and even maybe knowledge in its place when engaging with it all. The first poem - Alphabets (I found this on the web but am not sure how kosher it is to share, you can easily find it) and the last The Riddle (which I have not found on the web). In between much concerned with language and silence, ways with both -- and with a kind of integrity. So many to love. One of my favourites, A Daylight Art, considers the last day of Socrates and his concern that day with his persistent dream that told him to "practise the art" and so he is found, putting Aesop into verse by his friends on his final day.

But then we come to that partially in my enthusing - before that we have the context of the title poem, The Haw Lantern (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/poems-2-e.html). A poem that considers the Haw, its little world, and then on, its special integrity between pith and stone. A theme that informs A Daylight Art too. With my Jung reading I was thinking Jung may not have agreed with where A Daylight Art seems to go -- but then I hear Heaney's gentle irony and know he knew, even as he says:

" . . .
Practise the art which art until that moment
he always took to mean philosophy.
Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift

for practising the right one from the start -
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep sunk panoramas rise and pass

like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye."

This poem was dedicated to Norman MacCaig, and I'm interested in that for them both. It's also a light poem in some ways, it makes me smile to think how a poet may wish no boundary to the source of dreams, and this exactly what I picture Jung objecting to, something it itself says Socrates did not have. This poem is a dream. I am sure Heaney knows what he is saying, and not.

And so is The Haw Lantern wonderful. As that tiny lantern morphs into an idea of Diogenes searching for his honest man at once this is also contemporary Heaney from road blocked Ireland and his own search for his own honesty. This is a search that is a search most human. He's engaging with the big ideas with all his well trained resources and at the same time bringing them all back home - which is the point of course of why people had them, not to distance and rule, but to answer the questions of their human hearts, minds, souls.

I have not mentioned his dedication for the collection - its first words if you like after Station Island had come only to hope to raise dust in the dried up font. He says:

" For Bernard and Jane McCabe

The riverbed, dried up, half full of leaves,
Us, listening to a river in the trees."

A different turn from that dried up font. I bought my copy I now check back in 2013. I think I must have seen this, though I had not read the collection. It must have been there and informed a line I wrote myself in what may be my own best poem 'I've heard the invisible river of trees. Watched a sea of leaves, waves crash to fields." Though that itself comes for me from a walking experience far longe ago for me, and other things. But it may be part, as well as maybe finding something more than that dried up font in life, which is maybe why I feel so sympathetic to this collection. He feels like he is making a turn that I recognise in some ways in myself, towards myself, towards questions and answer. "Seek and you will find."

Our teacher suggested his focus before is more tied up with his theme of digging and that he lets that go in this collection and later, as also his last political poems of a certain sort. Maybe I wrong to say too much as I have not read the later collections yet -- and I need to catch up to where I am with the chapters on these collections in Stepping Stones.

There is more yet to this collection - poems referring to his parents. Famously with the sequence Clearances in memoriam of his mother. A sequence of such tender love. I shall not comment. In it he turns again also to find meaning in absence. I am glad you can read it for yourselves here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57042/clearances.

This collection is a joy. I have not referred to his poem that Amnesty International asked him to write. He unable to do so, until he let them know he could not. The poem - From the Republic of Conscience - another of my favourites in this book. Again it is superfluous of me to speak of it - read it, I suggest. It was put into an Amnesty collection that he wrote the introduction to - you can read that here, though sadly I don't think the link to the poem at the end seems to work now, but these words, as I find in so much of his prose, illuminating - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/belfast-and-beyond/seamus-heaney-human-rights-y...

There are other poems I could gush about, other favourites in this collection. I'll stop. His quest, his talent, his relevance to me and in opening up so much of his learning and grapples with that, are something I am grateful to be able to read. So, onwards, I've begun Seeing Things, (I'm good at that) but also slowly and considering where I have been, where I am.

edit - I should also be cautious when speaking of Reformation and Counter Reformation - as I do not know where Seamus Heaney came to stand in religious matters, though he seemed to move away from some aspects. Also when I quote Christ - for myself that is not a simplistic equation with Christianity, but one of addressing the questions of being and finding. Maybe I do not know what Seamus Heaney found and do not mean to suggest any more than seeking and what he shares as findings - but his sharing of his personal journey I find wonderful.

106tonikat
Nov 25, 2017, 5:10 am

>105 tonikat: I don't mean self aggrandisement with my river in the trees and his. if I alluded to Heaney it was unconscious. I cannot even say for sure, although I had bought the book, that I had read that dedication. I also heard my river a long time ago. I'm reading Stepping Stones and now the chapter on The Haw Lantern and now learn, as Heaney does during the interview that Emily Dickinson also had a river in the trees -- I don't think I have read that, yet, I may be wrong. But I like that and the idea that of course poets are writing about the same things, even though the way they do may be somewhat different and their meaning. If I had known two such writers had used such a phrase it would probably have given me very great reserve, whereas that poem was all about letting myself feel something important just in me.

108tonikat
Modifié : Déc 18, 2017, 3:41 pm

My comments on The Haw Lantern may also have been a bit knotted, I think it is followable, if you can be bothered, the discussion of the title poem and A Daylight Art a bit interwoven.



Seeing Things rivals The Haw Lantern in my favourites, but not quite, he's gone beyond and I have to be honest my clay feet are catching up, still more with the latter in sympathy just yet, maybe.

I have not caught up yet with my reading of Stepping Stones interviews with Seamus Heaney -- so I must do that, and it makes my comments as ever provisional. In fact that is no bad thing. These collections are wonderful and the last especially spoke to me, then there is the extra focus of my group, it all calls me towards seriousness. Yet my comments in my threads have always sought to avoid stodginess (for the most part) and reflect my feelings and reactions, not be academic or labelling, to seem to know. So, reminded again to be with that.

Seeing Things is framed by an introductory translation from the Aeneid, The Golden Bough (Book VI lines 98-141) (later translated more fully and revised) and from Dante, The Crossing (Inferno, Canto III, lines82-129). So, the underworld and Hell, the afterlife, throughout this book.

Seeing things literally, things seen but also the beyond - the poet, vision. And the difference and the meeting points in the everyday of the solid and the vision...a poem of children playing football into the dark obeying unmarked lines for the pitch, in their minds....crossings between these areas.

Whilst The Haw Lantern reflected on his mother and her loss, his father and his passing to the fore here.

The book made up of two parts, the first in line with his usual lyric style, named poems, wonderful. The first, The Journey Back meets Larkin's shade and makes a distinction of him that I enjoyed, whilst at the same time seemingly so true I have to wonder about it a bit - "A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry." So many beautiful poems, the title poem (all its parts, the third curiously made me remember my father and being with him as a child), the recognitions and finding words for these things seen, hard to speak of.

The Pitchfork stands out to me having read him in sequence to here - his recognition of this tool, his appraisal of it, how it is used, how it works, struck me in comparison to his earlier Digging and spades - here it feels the pitchforks prongs are more implicated with what it moves and he concludes in likening it to a hand. It stands out to me as a reappraisal of his poetic, what he is doing, how, recalibrated, increased in sensitivity. I also have a dim feeling I may have heard him say something like that on television once, but I don't know for sure, didn't remember (?if I have) until I had read it.

The first part concludes with The Fosterling - which may increase this sense of revision and engagement with what he was doing, he seems to announce a stepping off again, further development (I may have settled by then myself, I'd think, or maybe not, that's not how he got there), he concludes this sonnet with this sestet:

"Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The Tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten."

Some doldrums as he had, but he should know. I'm reading this at the same age, he's speaking to me, a nine to five person, I thought I'd credited marvels, but still, maybe not. The tree-clock an Irish tale of a place that sold their soul to him that would buy them (whoever said that was even possible? I need to know about that now), but anyway, to trick him they built a clock in a tree that was running fast, so at the appointed time they could say he was too late, deal broken.

But a stepping off, and what a stepping off - I could argue with myself as to whether this may make this my favourite collection - the next part of the book is called Squarings. It has four parts - Lightenings, Settings, Crossings and Squarings. The poems untitled, numbered, he saw them as a square I understand - forty-eight poems of twelve lines, in three line verses, perhaps inspired by Dante but not in terza rima, twelve poems in each section.

I have heard some suggest it is true poetry to have sections flowing, no titles, a sequence of jewels, all of which may apply to these. You can read the first section here - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57045/squarings-lightenings - number viii famous of course, but all wonderful and may leave you wanting the rest, I don't think you'd be disappointed.

In a way I don't want to say much. I find his words and example inspiring, turning through a personal dialogue with the dialogues of the past and stepping all the time on, on, asking, clarifying his questions. I think finding in his seeking, personally, undogmatically, generously sharing:

"One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf."

(Squarings, Settings, xiv)

109dchaikin
Déc 18, 2017, 8:07 pm

Earlier this year I read Heaney’s full translation of Aeneid book vi, which was published posthumously (with original Latin in the facing page.) Interesting to see a little how it fits in his own poetry.

110tonikat
Modifié : Déc 20, 2017, 2:01 pm

thanks dan, will find your review over the holidays. I understand he revised the translation of this part within that larger translation. Heaney had a very thorough classical education as I understand it, very engaged with this and more and referred to in his work.

111tonikat
Modifié : Déc 29, 2017, 5:37 am



Dart by Alice Oswald

I tried to read this a number of years ago - unsure how many. On a lovely sunny day after a walk on the beach. Somehow I did not settle to it - I found the inserts to the text describing who is speaking off putting (I'm over that now) and then I was interrupted several times and maybe the day got in my way, a day for being out in my world.

I've since heard others advise reading it in a sitting and so left it until I had such a chance.

I saw Alice Oswald read this year and was hugely impressed by her. So was glad to take this chance and advance to book two of my plan to read her in chronological order.

This is a long poem in two parts - it is a poem that follows the river Dart from its source to the sea. In doing so it explores the Dart, the people it meets, ghosts, the country, flora and fauna, sounds, what is under the sun over the Dart, and the moon. It has two parts - 'Who's this moving alive over the moor?' and 'Silence'.

Alice Oswald has an authors' note - explaining that over two years she recorded conversations with people along the Dart. Though she is careful not to ascribe any of the poems words directly to anyone or even to any fixed fiction - she says "All voices should be read as the river's mutterings". She also refers to the poem as a songline from source to sea.

And that says it all - this was a very happy reading, though I think I had to do it over two sessions. It really does have that flavour of a voice from source to sea, playful, twisting, turning, serious, moving, reunited with the sea. Wonderful - and at the same time you feel you meet the spirit of some of those places and people and that relationship of river and humans and environs.

I'd planned to write this after a second read through -- but wanted to be more up to date with my reading -- it is another book of poetry to read and read again. I found Alice Oswald's voice very clear when I heard her -- and in a way maybe it can now fit with this, though maybe the river's voice whilst also partly hers is also distinct - but this is a playful, serious, tumbling of a river voice through its life. A great idea to have had and to have made happen in this respectful way of meeting what is there and what is there though not quite there and what has been.

Edit - also have to note how very good Alice Oswald is on water -- there was a string of poems in her first collection on this that I liked very much and it is continued here of course.

112tonikat
Modifié : Déc 28, 2017, 1:52 pm



A Dream Play by August Strindberg

I read this in a collection of his plays Miss Julie and other plays. I don't know much about Strindberg really. I've heard of him of course and mostly know of him in his influence on Ingmar Bergman. In the last month or so I was lucky to go to a presentation on Bergman and to a screening of Persona (have sen it a number of times now) and then also to see Fanny and Alexander. That last film ends with the young protagonist finding his apparently insomniac grandmother and sitting with her as she begins to read this play. It seemed to me that the course of the film had moved through a series of presentations of the world, from a solid nineteenth century type family saga through death (Hamlet) and fracture to a new reality, multi layered and so, as with the last time I saw the film wanted to read this play quoted at the end with the author's note:

"Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blend of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, absurdities, and improvisations."

Strindberg, Johan August; Michael Robinson. Miss Julie and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics) (p. 176). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

Though I think I remember 'place' in the film, the subtitles at least, was given as 'space' - which gives a greater resonance maybe.

I read it very quickly, in a day. It takes a view from high of human life - I read it as if in a trance, but a real one. There were several sections I found very quotable. It is dreamy - the stage directions too, I look forward very much to see a production one day. It's high view due to being about the descent of Indra's daughter to earth. It offers a sort of long view on humanity. I read in a trance and enjoyed it very much. But it left me feeling quite down. It inevitably shows how humans limit our endless possibility. It does point to the advice of prophets, including to the Christian, but it offers little hope a world in line with such teachings is in the offing, here on earth, in the material. Noted in my copy there is a section that is the least dreamlike which probably gives this impression most. But having said this it also seems to point towards secrets, the secret of life, and refreshes possibility, not least in showing dead ends in that that seems necessary. So I may not be right to be left feeling a bit low. I suppose I felt less like it stayed with those ways out, but I am may not be fair to say that, it may (quite rightly?) suggest such ways out are personal, it's not left me hopeful of them socially...but again that may only be the fault of its accuracy, its resonance with these times and the peculiar way our times seem to be so engaged in making such pessimism true.

It also struck me that I felt especially low as the daughter was confronted with the reality of the mundane and repetition especially, and the idea that in even such a being, as perhaps in beings like me too, hope may be drained by such -- and of course so much of modern life, especially working life, seems to offer such as what we may hope for. Or is that my mixed upness? And maybe that again just points me towards what we must do, seek, the light . . . but it made me aware of how hard it can be made . . . and how it is not seen as the legitimate goal in how we are often asked to proceed.

This is where I am for now - I must reread it, sit with it, and also need to find a way to see a production, there may be a film. Bergman directed this play in theatre more than any other. I know he made a television film -- off to search for some now. Maybe I am mixed up about it and where it has left me a quirk for me for now. This was like an after effect, it wasn't so much with me as I read it.

113tonikat
Modifié : Déc 29, 2017, 6:45 am



Poems: Li Po and Tu Fu translated by Arthur Cooper

Something in the past year led me to Chinese poets - it may have been a facebook meme thing of a poem by Li Po (also known as Li Bai). That led me to read a bit about him and relearn of him and especially his death, the myth of which has him drowning from having reached into the waters to embrace the reflection of the moon. That's well known - but I'd forgotten all about it -- it immediately made me remember having seen a children's programme about him as a kid, I found it inspiring, and remember how taken I was with him, his life, his poems and this story and then also how shocked I was by the story of how he left his poems with someone who lost them, only to find them again by chance, how that shocked me. I remember I saw this on a lovely sunny day and where I was and it brought back details of that room then. I remembered part of my self, earlier interest in poetry, in life. It could be that his story was part of what fed into the idea we can have of revelry and poetry, and living to the full. I also know that no one I mentioned this all to seemed to care very much -- but then it occurred to me just now that there may have been friends I did not mention it to as my expectation was they would not get it, and it feels very wrong of me if I did that, a way I categorised them and then made that category real, a way of not believing in them maybe. But then it may have been more complicated, maybe I did not get them so wrong - and non interest reactions by some may also have made categories seem real. I think it may also have been wrong of me to have kept such interest so much to myself, but then that may also have other aspects. I wonder if heaven would be a place everyone shows the appropriate interest to everything, and has time to do so.

I digress -- so I got fired up to read Chinese poets and am glad this is one of the books I came to. It has an excellent and lengthy introduction. The highlight of the introduction, for me, being that it leads you to read some Chinese characters, which I found most enjoyable. Oh to have time to do be able to learn that.

I've seen Cooper's translations criticised for their variability, he has a particular technique that I've seen criticised as working sometimes and not others. I wonder, it may be I came to this book as I read a translation of his (which is in this book) entitled 'Bathed and Washed' which I am entirely in love with. For the most part I don't know these poems well enough to be too critical myself - and where is the translation, anywhere, that may not be criticised. he writes sensitively throughout and the poems come with further notes on them, sometimes of several pages, it has all been very very helpful and a great way to come to these poets.

Though I have also done that with other voices in my ear, which may help -- it may also confuse me as to Cooper's voice.

What can be said of these two Great poets. People whose company you suspect was electric, but real. People maybe partially hidden to me by change in China -- the society they came from also of great fascination, the Tao, Confucius, more.

I think my sympathy goes more naturally to Li Bai. I find his spontaneity more my thing, maybe also what is seen as possibly some carelessness, I'd prefer carefreeness, I like that, if anything, it seems to keep things in a good perspective. Of course some claim Tu Fu as the greatest, (does that measuring have any meaning, really?) it may be - from these poems and what else I have seen, what a poet, what a technician too, but one wholly in tune with poetry, never merely technical. They were of course also friends. It may be I am coming to learn Tu Fu's voice better and surprise myself with that as I do, he leads me onto paths of consideration less used perhaps.

Another book to read and reread - not least as it has so much information in it, about new and strange subjects (landscape, geography, history, philosophy) I will be having to go back and forth to it, as I am.

Bathed and Washed

'Bathed in fragrance,
do not brush your hat;
Washed in perfume,
do not wash your coat:

'Knowing the world
fears what is too pure,
the wisest man
prizes and stores light!'

By Bluewater
an old angler sat:
You and I together,
let us go home.

Li Bai (trans. Arthur Cooper)

edit -- ahh a scary thought, what if the interest others showed was the appropriate amount of interest! ahhh the woes of poets, too sensitive? Maybe heaven would be the level of interest appropriate to each individual and awareness of all relativity.

114tonikat
Modifié : Déc 29, 2017, 4:23 pm



The Rhythm of Bernard of Morlaix, monk of Cluny, on The Celestial Country by Bernard of Morlaix translated by Rev. J. Mason Neale

At the end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a quote, which I understand to be a slight misquote, replacing "roma' with "rosa":

“stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus”

I remember this can be translated as 'the ancient rose has a name, we hold only empty names'.

I love Eco's book and this quote. I'm not sure where I get that he may have changed it slightly. But it comes from Bernard of Morlaix and as I understand it from his long poem de contemptu mundi (of contempt for the world). So in a bid to learn more I tried to get hold of a copy of this poem - this is what I could get, a selection from that work of the parts that focus on the Celestial Country. I read a part and shelved it.

Then this week my shelf broke, one pin holding it sheared off - but no disaster, fortunately, it tipped backwards, no damage to books. I piled them up on my desk and when sitting there noticed this on the top and that I had not completed it, it's not long. And I went with that feeling that having noticed this maybe I should follow it and am very glad I did.

My Latin is rubbish, always was. In his preface Neale himself speaks of his translation being "so free as to be little more than an imitation". Hard for me to judge. Another language I wish I could read. I still enjoyed this.

The rhythm of the title is that in which Bernard wrote - a feat very difficult to pull off and one which Bernard of Morlaix attributed to divine inspiration. The verse is called leonini cristati trilices dactylici. I'd need to look that up to explain more. Neale translates this as alternating lines of seven and six syllables, sometimes rhyming abab sometimes abcb. It flows beautifully, singing a song.

That song speaks of course of heaven - which wasn't especially the reason I mentioned heaven above, but maybe part of that being on my mind. It's lovely. It does leave me wanting to read the larger poem it is taken from which I understand flows between the ills of the world (a world changing in many ways around Bernard of Morlaix) and these thoughts on heaven - Neale quotes a Dean of Westminster as saying the poem "instead of advancing, eddies round and round his object, recurring again and again to that which he seemed to have thoroughly treated and dismissed". So I am more fascinated still. Maybe a type of healing (something I am always interested in) looking at ills and comparing to bliss.

Some of these lines on heaven are well known to have found their way into hymns, this translation points out especially Jerusalem the Golden.

I was also very struck that I was reminded of Emily Dickinson as I read. I've not been reading her lately - and would have to check but wondered if maybe the metre of seven and then six syllables reminded me (correctly anyway) of at least some of her poems. I'd also have to check whether the rhyme scheme reminded me of her at all. But the content very definitely reminds me of her when she speaks of eternity. There is also this, of course it is in Jerusalem the Golden,:

And they, who with their leader,
Have conquered in the fight,
For ever and for ever
Are clad in robes of white

Maybe she knew the hymn. Maybe there are other factors.

My reading of her through has stalled - I'd read about two hundred and seventy of the Johnson Collected when I learned a few things that felt important about the Franklin Collected and switched to that - but it totally threw my rhythm and as I'd gone back to the start again, so I hope to restart in the coming months. I wonder too if my impression of possible influence of this opon her (she used that spelling for a long time) is something related to her earlier poems and will be reading to see if that changes. Of course she wore white late in life, that may suggest not. Neale's first preface was dated 1858, so I suppose it is possible she may have read this. I searched her legacy library but have not found a copy. Maybe I'll learn more if I get on with biography of her too.

I hope to read Bernard of Morlaix's full poem too, though may be daunted by his view of the world's ill, and sin. (I have not found Eco's quote yet - I may have missed it, or it may be in another section of the poem.)

(One of the touchstones suggests to me that Bernard is a Saint, I had not known that. edit - though looking elsewhere I don't see that mentioned, may be a touchstone error in the listing for Rev. Neale)

115dchaikin
Déc 29, 2017, 12:58 pm

loved your review of Dart and the river's mutterings.

116tonikat
Déc 30, 2017, 6:15 am

thanks Dan - AO's description that.

117tonikat
Modifié : Jan 1, 2018, 8:30 am



Wild by Cheryl Strayed

This was a great book to read quite slowly over the last six weeks or so of the year, and a great one to complete on New Year's Eve. A best seller - no doubt as in speaking so personally it speaks generally to many people.

I'd wanted to see the film for a long time and managed to see about two thirds of it in October or early November and had no doubt I wanted to read this. My copy is subtitled 'A journey from lost to found' - sometimes that i see has an additional 'on the Pacific Crest Trail'. But lost to found, yes, that interests me, and walking, that interests me.

In not seeing the start of the film I missed some of how Cheryl Strayed came to make this walk -- her traumatic and rapid loss of her mother a few months after a diagnosis of cancer. Her personal slide after that, struggle with herself. She writes graphically, honestly and movingly of this. Also of her childhood, of her difficult relationship with her father, who her mother left, and so no relationship with him, except to the difficulty and absence. And where this all took her in her grief -- and how she allowed herself to listen to a whisper, when she saw a book about the Pacific Crest Trail to set that as a goal, something she needed to do. And came to do it - in some ways unprepared to many a mind maybe, but really very prepared to take on this task, in her need to do so, also to some extent in her background of some familiarity with he wild. But of the many streaks of wildness in this boom, the way she did it was wild in some ways itself - and really made me think of how in being prepared to walk, following plans, how to some extent you may then interact with the plan and less the walk itself. It's not that she had no plan either, I don't man to suggest that.

But a wonderful book - a moving book. It reminds me of moving, walking. I've never walked anywhere near such a distance but it reminds you of that, inspires you to do so. But moving as in doing this she encounters herself, all her demons and these things move in her, through her, over her, til in the end she moves. Her walk challenges her and holds her, as she herself says. At times it moved me to tears. A generous book to share, a journey shared, what is most personal may be most general.

And what a thing to do. I love to walk, day hiking mostly, often on my own. Though I've been getting my head around what that will be like kat mode (took my first walk in the country recently with some friends), but wonder whether Kat would walk on her own. So I start to get a sense of what a thing it was for her to do this as a single woman. Inspiring.

In reading it I was struck this is a cousin of The Rings of Saturn - she does not speak of society and culture int he same sort of way - though her love of literature transmits. But as a walk, it reminded of Sebald. There was also an encounter with uncanniness and lostness that especially reminded me of him. And the journey itself, its spirit journey aspect reminded me of that too, and much else, and of such possibility in our world.

118tonikat
Jan 1, 2018, 8:28 am

I'm not going to close this year with stats. No, I'm back to that not being me.

I do know I have made little progress in redressing the gender balance of my reading overall and so hope to address that this next year. Much of my reading has been wonderful and hope that continues on my 2018 thread, which is here -

http://www.librarything.com/topic/278176

I realise I have not said much about some important reading I've been doing - William Wordsworth, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka's short stories and think I may try to add more thoughts as I'm moving through them in future, without having had to reach a completion (however temporary that may be, as they never can be completed really).

Many thanks for all the feedback on this thread, I hope you join me in 2018. I wish you all, us all, a Happy, healthy and peaceful New Year.