Category Archives: Literature

Bibliotherapy

August 5, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Recovery Moon

Bibliotherapy session with Nina from Melbourne this morning. Mostly I want another perspective on my reading, a possible way to organize and focus. It’s not so much that I need this; I can find books on my own and have done for years; but, I want to think through, with someone else, a way of concentrating my effort. Time is not infinite for us finite beings, at least not with the books available on this planet.

Skype has a magical quality. The old videophone of the bright cartoon illustrations of the future made real. Like space travel, landing on the moon. How it performs with no time lag in the conversation is still a mystery to me. This morning it will take me half-way around the world, to a continent I’ve never visited, to speak with a person I’ve never met. Nina comes as a referral from Simona in London where I connected with the School of Life.

Think of that. The colonies communicating with the old homeland for connection. In real time.

Well, about time to start. More later.

Humanities, Literature, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Bibliotherapy

June 20, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Healing Moon

My father’s day present from Kate is a session with the bibliotherapists at the School of Life. I’ll write more about it after I’ve had my session, but I wanted to share here the questionnaire they send out in advance. Later, I’ll post my answers. Meanwhile, these are interesting questions to ponder.

I’m seeking their thoughts on a reading plan for the next few years. Feels like my reading has gotten chaotic and I’d like to put some more heft in it. We’ll see what the process produces.

Welcome to The School of Life Bibliotherapy Service.Prior to your consultation we would appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to answer the following questions.

Name: X

Contact no: X

instructions: Please send your answers to us at:bibliotherapy@theschooloflife.com

at least 24 hours before your consultation.

We look forward to speaking with you. PLEASE let us know 24 hours in advance if for some reason you can’t make your appointment. Failure to do so may result in forfeiting your session.

About your reading habits
How would you describe your relationship to books?	X
Did books feature largely in your childhood?	X
Where do you like to read?	X
Why do you read?	X
In a bookshop, which section do you head to first? And then?	X
Which books and authors have loved most? Least enjoyed?	X
Do you like the challenge of a big fat tome or do you prefer something slim?	X
Do you always finish the books you start?	X
In your mind, what constitutes a “good read”?	X
If there were such a thing as the perfect book for you, what would it be like?	X

About you
How old are you?	X
Are you single, co-habiting, married, divorced? Do you have kids?	X
What do you do for a living? for fun?	X
What is preoccupying you at the moment?	X
What are your passions?	X
What is missing from your life?	X
Where do you see yourself in 10 years’ time?	X

Letters, Literature, Writing

Bound Together

June 17, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Healing Moon

I thought they had to do with BDSM, but no. They are a type of type, well-known I imagine to my friend Mark Odegard.

“In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called “contextual forms”, where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

By way of example, the common ampersand (“&”) represents theLatin conjunctive word et, for which the English equivalent is the word “and”. The ampersand’s symbol is a ligature, joining the old handwritten Latin letters e and t of the word et, so that the word is represented as a single glyph.^{[1]” wikipedia}

Literature, Memories, Writing

Knausgaard

May 31, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, My Struggle: Volume I. This book hits me as his memories call up my memories. His father memories call to mind my own, distant father, somehow unknown and unknowable. As he sat at the kitchen table, ruler and fat pencil in hand, mocking up an ad for the Times-Tribune’s Thursday edition, the big one which made us paperboys groan as they weighted down our green canvas bags, I would watch him, wonder why a man of his intelligence would spend time doing this.

His mind (Knausgaard’s) roves around ideas and art and writing in ways I recognize, having traveled many of the paths on which he walks. He wonders about his visceral reaction to art, why one painting moves him and another doesn’t, why so many of the ones that do come from a time before the 20th century. He plays with epistemology, speculating on how confident we can be about knowing the world; it is there, as David Hume said when he kicked the rock and said, “I refute it thus,” referring to Bishop Berkeley’s world of perceptions only, yet the world is not so easily known, forming itself from colors, for example, that represent not what color something is, but exactly the color it isn’t.

And, too, he is Norwegian. So he describes the inner workings of a Scandinavian mind and a culture that references lutefisk, fjords, cold and snow in the way a Hawai’ian might mention taro, palm trees and the hula.

My Struggle is not for everyone. It is personal, microscopic, intimate, plotless, meandering. If you need a narrative that hangs together in the usual way, this is not it though there is a continuity, a sort of modest stream of consciousness, more like blocks of consciousness, that do connect one with the other.

A Death in Brazil

August 31, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

7th and 16th in GDP. 5th and 4th in population. 5th and 15th in geographic size. What are Brazil and Indonesia? I know little about either one. Trying to plug that gap at least a little I just finished a remarkable book called, A Death in Brazil, by Peter Robb.

(farofa fried cassava (manioc) flour)

It’s a strange book structurally and in terms of genre, impressionistic in its use of anecdotes sprinkled through research on Brazilian colonization, slavery, key literary figures and recent political ethos (through 2003). It is a Conradian evoking of the steamy foreign with strange, slightly distant figures acting and reacting in ways both understandable and despicable, and repetitive.

Yet, it is also a travel book, apparently recounting the author’s journey’s in Brazil, particularly in the northeastern coastal city of Recife. These passages go into detail about native Brazilian foods like farofa and moqueca de camarão (left).

Robb’s through line is about the first democratically elected president of Brazil, Fernando Collor and his money man, PC Farias. He recounts Collor rise to power in the small, poor state of Alagoas and PC’s role as his money man. Lula, the union organizer and presidential hopeful for the Worker’s Union Party, is the contrast to Collor, a man of the people rather than a man of the monied elite.

The book weaves in the work of Machado de Assis, Gilberto Freyre, and Euclides da Cunha, using these literary figures as lenses for viewing Brazilian society. It’s a clever deployment of literature because it illuminates the socio-political landscape of Brazil while focusing on Brazilian literary classics.

When finished, I had at least an outline of Brazilian history from the time of Portuguese colonization through 2003, an introduction to the slave trade and its unusually cruel instance in Brazil (the largest total number of slaves ever in the Western hemisphere and Brazil did not end slavery until 1888.), the political dynamic between the huge rural regions and the populous cities like Rio and Sao Paulo and an update of Brazilian political processes in the first decade of the new millennium.

Well worth reading.

Anybody know a similar book about Indonesia?

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, The Move, Third Phase

A Confrontation About Time

August 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New (College) Moon

This week on the calendar I have on Monday through Saturday: pack, Latin. Thursday will be our state fair day. Other than that packing, Latin and work in the garden will occupy us.

Today and until I’m done I will be packing the study in which I work every day. That means the sorting will get harder, green tape boxes outnumbering red tape ones. Probably by a lot. It also means the confrontation between time remaining (in my life) and the projects (intellectual and creative) that keep me excited will come center stage. I’ll try to sort out the ones I feel I can fruitfully engage over the next 20 years from the ones I can’t.

That means I’m considering active intellectual and creative work at least into my late 80’s. That feels like a stretch, maybe, but one I believe my health and potential longevity justifies.

Let me give you an idea of what I have in mind. Complete the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Write at least four more novels. Write essays or a book on Reimagining My Faith. Write and read much more poetry. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Enlightenment, liberal thought, modernism. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Great Work. Include in this work considered attention to Asian literature, art and thought, especially Chinese and Indian. Continue regular art historical research and write essays about aesthetics and particular art/artists.

Why? Because I can. I’ve no evidence so far that my thinking is strikingly original or unusually deep, but my intellectual maturation has taken a longer time than I imagined it would. So the best may yet be ahead. Or so it feels to me. Under any circumstances such work will keep me alert and focused.

As for right now. Where are those empty boxes?

Family, Literature, Our Land and Home

Needful Things

July 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

After coming back from the hardware and grocery stores, I cleaned our air conditioning unit coils. They get clogged up with cottonwood fluff. The fan pulling the air over the coils sucks the gray-white seed bearing plant matter onto the coils. If left on, it reduces the efficiency of the air conditioning unit considerably and can cause other problems.

Put the oil in the lawnmower, tried again to start it. Nope. Checked the manual. It goes into Beisswinger’s tomorrow. I’ll get woodchips to finish off the deck while I’m there. Those sort of things that need to get done.

I’ve been reading the Mysterious Benedict Society, volume 1, recommended by Ruth Olson. It’s not scintillating, but I can see why it’s an excellent kid’s book. It presents children as agents, effective in their own right. It also puts them into several different moral dilemmas, each difficult. The Society also captures a 10-12 year olds view of the adult world and in that serves as a good reminder to those of on the far, the very far side, of 12.

Oh, and our tunneling crew has been active. This time they’re digging right in front of the shed, a hole deep enough that when I saw Rigel in it her front shoulders were below ground. Why do they do it? No idea.

Family, Literature

Dragons and Corned Beef

July 11, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

The new Sienna (2011, but new to Jon and Jen) has been loaded. Ruth and I went to the grocery store to buy supplies for the road. There will be pumpernickel and corned beef sandwiches, dill pickle potato chips and Krave cereal for Ruth.

Ruth and I had a talk about dragons and books about dragons on the way to the store. I recommended a recent read, His Majesty’s Dragon. She recommended back the Mysterious Benedict Society. It’s fun to have a grandchild old enough to share books.

They will lift off tomorrow around 7 am, headed west, forerunners to our own, larger move, following in Jon’s now long ago wake. That means Kep, Vega, Rigel and Gertie and I will have the house to ourselves until next Saturday.

Asia, Cinema and Television, Literature

Her and Journey to the West

June 26, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer New (Most Heat) Moon

By way of cinema reviews. Saw “Her” last night and “Journey to the West” tonight. Though very different culturally both encourage us to stretch our understanding of reality to include the fantastic, Her through science fiction and Journey to the West through very loose adaptation of Chinese classic literature.

Kate found Her too slow, too odd, too much altogether and declared, “This isn’t holding my interest.” got up and did other things. In spite of the dorky ear plugs that signaled connection to the Operating System (btw: OS seemed like a bad techno-term for Samantha, the artificial person created through use of computers. Not sure why they didn’t go with program, but the oddness of the choice distracted me.) I found the questions raised by the movie intriguing.

What would it be like to be an intelligent, feeling entity with no body? What it would be like to have a non-corporeal lover? What algorithm could cause us to fall in love? What would fidelity mean to such an entity? All these questions get raised. Ironically the main character, Joaquin Phoenix’s job is to write real letters, often love letters, for other people.

Yes, it was a little slow at times, though I felt the time necessary to play with the idea of a computer/human relationship. Amy Adams and Scarlett Johansson (voice of Samantha) added contemporary female starpower.

Journey to the West was a major disappointment. It combined the sometimes entertaining but very broad comedy sometimes seen in Chinese cinema, think Kung Fu Hustle by the same director, Stephen Chow, with ridiculous set piece scenes and a remarkable lack of fidelity to the Chinese class, Journey to the West. The Monkey King is the key character in Journey to the West as literature, but here he comes in very late in the movie, well into the final third and he comes in as a caricature and not a good one.

The original Monkey King is mischievous and unpredictable, but he also has a noble, courageous side that this movie ignores. The CGI effects were often very good, but used in the service of a juvenile script. China can do better than this with their own literary classics.

Art and Culture, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

1001

April 18, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Usually I would do Latin in the afternoon after the nap since I spent the morning on the America Votes meeting, but instead today I began to nose around in another favorite locale of mine, the 1001 Nights. I’ve read two different translations of the tales of Scheherazade, both entertaining, but I’ve learned through two new books in my library, “Stranger Magic”by Maria Warner and “The Arabian Nights-A Companion,” by Robert Irwin, that both of the translations have significant flaws.

So I found two new translations, one with only 271 tales but the other, with an introduction by Irwin himself, that is three volumes long. When I finish up with Malcolm X, I intend to get back into the Arabian Nights. Between Ovid and the Arabian Nights the tales are endless and well told. There’s something profound in the types of stories a culture folds into itself, makes significant through reception. The same is true, I suppose, of individuals. I’ve had djinn and Dionysus running around in my head since high school.

Then there’s that whole matter of the biblical stories, too. The narrative lenses through which we come to understand our lives and the lives of others. Those three: Bible, Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights are more key to me than most of the greats of Western literature, perhaps with the exception of Kafka and Hesse. The other work that stands with these in my own inner world is the Chinese classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

This is the way my life goes lured by political change, entranced by stories of the divine and the magical, enfolded in the life of plants and dogs, wrapped up in the world of art. There are worse ways to live.