Books of Poetry

Sharing more content. It looks like that is all I am capable of at this moment. Anyway, this is better than anything I could possibly come up with out of my head

This is about poetry- it is alright if you like to read poems, but the experience of reading a book of poems by an individual poet is an experience that is not of the ordinary kind-

Reading a poetry book cover-to-cover is a vastly different experience fromreading individual poems. It can be exhausting, as watching an entire opera can be exhausting. ....

I have gotten to know several poets through their books of verse. While, ofcourse, “the narrator is not the poet,” the composition of poetry is an actof personal exposure and the publication of poetry is an act of public intimacy. ....

... In *Tantalus in Love* Alan Shapiro records the inside and outside of a dying marriage with exquisite skill and filigreed detail: his wife’s beautiful body, poised in yoga each morning, just out of touch; his children, watching their parents dancing and laughing together for the last time. Autobiographical or not, volumes of poetry feather open the writer’s human heart and lay it, pinned and spread, on butterfly pages.....

This experience of an emotional or intellectual journey is probably the most valuable, and the most difficult, reward of reading entire volumes of verse.The binding threads are more likely to be ideas or perspectives than characters or conflicts. ...

Read more at Curator, In Praise of the Book.

Ernest Hemingwasy- the art of writing

Image via Wikipedia

Do check this interview at The Paris Review-

INTERVIEWER

     But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?

HEMINGWAY

     Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

You immediately get the idea that this is the word of a master. Insightful.

The Pleasures of Literature

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I am reading "Curiosities of Literature" by John Sutherland.

Samuel Johnson is quoted as saying,

"Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully, for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else."

I sent a part of this passage as sms to some of my friends- one of them replied with no mean guilt, "I think this is meant for us- we need to be careful".  But Samuel Johnson is not asking us to diet. He is  boasting that he took greater care to eat more, not less,  for Boswell writes,-

"When at table... his looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible."

How times change- we are all gluttons now, and when we hear mind what you eat, we think we are asked eat less, not more: our enjoyment of eating is now tinged with the guilt of abusing our health: food itself has become a forbidden fruit.

Elsewhere in this chapter, which is all about the pleasure of eating as described in literature, Sutherland quotes a curious passage from a short story by Guy de Maupassant: two strangers, one of them a young man, travel together- he helps a lactating young woman rid herself of the pain of lactation- the passage goes,

"Il se mit a genoux devant elle; et elle se pencha vers lui, portant vers sa bouche, dans un geste de nourrice, le bout fonce de sons sein. Dans le mouvement qu'elle fit en le prenant de ses deux main pour le tendre vers cet homme, une goutte de lait apparut au sommet. Il la but vivement, saisissant comme un fruit cette lourde mamelle entres ces levres. Et il se mit a teter d'un facon goulue et reguliere."

Not having the confidence that I could learn French to decipher the meaning of this passage, which Sutherland promises is voluptuous and icky, I turned to Google Translate:

"He began his knees before her and she leaned toward him, carrying to his mouth in a gesture of nurse, after dark in sound. In the movement she made by taking his two hands for towards this man, a drop of milk appeared at the top. He drank it eagerly, seizing a heavy fruit this udder between these lips. And he began to suck a greedy and lawful manner".

Such are the pleasures of literature.

The Trees and Plants of His Home...

A poem I liked, and tried to bring over to English - Eppothum Pen.

An enmity has survived for two generations
between siblings.
The Men, when they come against one other,
throw a glare, and turn away.
The Women pass by,
their heads bowed down.
And the Children, when there is no one to note,
Share among themselves looks
that none recognise.


Enmity...
whether with purpose or not,
has in its branching hands,
flowers,
the sweetest of the fruits
that there be,
and for the father's rocking chair,
a shade
it extends across the partition wall:
the trees and plants of his home.

-Poem by R. Anuradha

(image credit: eyefetch.com)

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie got awarded another award, and I found this interesting answer:

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"Do people make history, or does history make people?"


... "Fury came out on September 11, 2001," he said. "No one felt much like reading that day. What was written as a portrait of contemporary Manhattan ended up being a historical novel the very day it was released." He described reading what he had intended as a sharply satirical passage at a Manhattan bookstore after the attack. But the context had changed. "I got waves of nostalgia coming from the audience.""

Crusty Mark Twain Gets Poetic

Mark Twain via last.fm

You know, we should not judge an author by what he writes- for example Mark Twain. Can you imagine him writing ths? More chance that George Bernard Shaw would write a poem declaring his love.

You are a decoration, you little witch!:

"The idea of your house going to the wanton expense of a flower garden! Aren't you enough? And what do you want to go and discourage the other flowers for? Is that the right spirit? Is it considerate? Is it kind? How do you suppose they feel when you come around looking the way you look? And you so pink and sweet and dainty and lovely and supernatural? Why, it makes them feel embarrassed and artificial, of course; and in my opinion it is just as pathetic as it can be. Now then you want to reform dear and do right. "

But, apparently he wrote it to a nine year girl. Amazing.

Maoist LitCrit

Nepal Maoists disapprove of Nobel for German author

"Nepal's former Maoist guerrillas have denounced the award of the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature to German author Herta Mueller by the Swedish Academy Thursday, saying it reflected the institution's growing bias towards the communists."

We are waiting for their response to the Peace Prize awarded to Obama.

George Orwell

George Orwell is one of my favorite people, in fact I will say that he has shaped the way I see the world- especially my dislike of Communism. I think I got it even before I knew what Communism was.

At Telegraph is a great article that alphabetically covers much of what Orwell was- the man, his works, and his legacy.

Here I have selected things about which I can say something- here they are (what is in italics are my comments)

• A is for Animal Farm

(Animal farm is a great book, even children can enjoy that. There is an animation film based on this story, and even kids love it. The story transcends time and age.)

First published on August 17 1945 by Secker & Warburg, Orwell's allegory about Stalinism – in which a revolutionary uprising by the animals of Manor Farm brings about a self-inflicted totalitarian system – made him famous and has since become a modern classic. It was written in 1943 and 1944 after his experiences fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. He later explained that his first-hand experience escaping the Communist purges in Spain – and their misrepresentation by the Left back home – taught him ''how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries''. The book was ready for publication in April 1944, but Victor Gollancz, who had published his first five books, refused to publish it because it attacked the Soviet Union, then an ally. Jonathan Cape agreed to take it but withdrew support – a decision believed to have been influenced by Peter Smollett, who worked at the Ministry of Information and was later revealed as a Soviet agent. This year, further information has come to light about how T S Eliot rejected the piece on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics. As director of Faber and Faber, his 1944 letter – made public by his widow Valerie – praised the book's ''good writing'' and ''fundamental integrity", but said: ''We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time.''

• B is for Burma

(I had "Shooting an Elephant" for ancillary something in College. This story is about about Orwell's Burmese days. There is something sad about what Orwell and Maugham write about their Asiatic experience. Makes us feel alien even in our own eyes. Great writing.)

Orwell spent five formative years in his twenties in Burma, joining the Indian Imperial Police in 1922. He acquired considerable responsibilities; when posted to Twante as a subdivisional officer, he was responsible for the security of 200,000 people. His experiences would form the basis of his debut novel, Burmese Days (1934), and two key essays, A Hanging (1931), and Shooting an Elephant (1936). The latter, written from a policeman's perspective, describes conflicted attitudes – disgust at the Empire and at the native population – that many have ascribed to Orwell: ''With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.''

• D is for 'Down and Out'

(If I am happy that I happened to  read any book, it is this. Superb piece of writing. It makes you want to do what Orwell did. I posted an account of a lady who met Orwell when Orwell was collecting material for this book. That one was a great piece about Orwell. You will find that here.) 

Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell's first full-length work, published in 1933 and drawing on his previous five years' experience of low-living on the breadline. Orwell proved a class-A tramp, showing indefatigable curiosity and courage about the grinding life of Europe's homeless and penniless. He was an undercover investigative journalist avant le lettre, dressing like a tramp, dropping his accent as best he could – although it was remarked upon that his middle-class origins were swiftly detected.

• K is for 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying'

(This is another book of Orwell that I read- a love story, poisoned by the need for money. There is a passage here where Orwell goes biblical, it is fantastic. You feel sad that love takes second place behind money. But that is survival- not just love and sex, but also work and bread. We may not like that, but it is the way life is.)

Gordon Comstock, the protagonist of Orwell's sourly funny novel, is a bookshop assistant, boiling with frustrated literary aspiration. The joyously misanthropic detail of his observations drew on Orwell's own experiences. In October 1934, his aunt Nellie Limouzin found him a job as a part-time assistant in Booklover's Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead. In the novel, Comstock gets overcome by nausea at the sight of the tomes around him: ''Dull-eyed, he gazed at the wall of books. He hated the whole lot of them, old and new, highbrow and lowbrow, snooty and chirpy. The mere sight of them brought home to him his own sterility. For here was he, supposedly a 'writer', and he couldn't even 'write'!''

• N is for 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

(About this, everyone knows. Ultra-pessimistic. I think what big brother failed to do, Google has made possible- especially see how China manages criticism. We need to have a separate post on this.)

It is impossible to overstate the enduring significance of Nineteen Eighty-Four (published June 1949), which has become a key text around the world in holding a mirror up to the actual – and potential – abuses of state power. That Orwell looked at the incoming technology of television and foresaw a time when the box in the corner of the living room might be capable of monitoring people – not just being watched – is just one example of his prescience. The novel is packed with bleakly satirical inventions, and components of the fictional world he constructed have entered into the lexicon as real-world signifiers. ''Doublethink'', the capacity to hold true to a thought that is patently false, in subservience to a prevailing orthodoxy, has become common currency, as has "thought police" and ''thoughtcrime". Variations on the phrase ''Big Brother is Watching You'', have become synonymous with today's surveillance society – not to mention reality TV shows.

Some of the themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four echo Orwell's earlier work. In his essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942), he wrote: ''Nazi theory … specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'science'. There is only 'German science', 'Jewish science' etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.''

By the way, this is the power of money:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not 

money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And 

though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, 

and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could 

remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I 

bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to 

be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money 

suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not 

itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her 

own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in 

iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth 

all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now 

abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these 

is money."

I Corinthians xiii (adapted) 

- George Orwell.org 

George Orwell writes like wonder...

Dickens meets Kafka

Circumlocution Office- Containing the whole Science of Government

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government.  No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office.  Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.  It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.  If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen.  It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings.  Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office.  It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it.  It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done.  It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it.  It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you.  All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion.  Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him.  It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything.  Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn't get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn't get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day.  Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away.  In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes, parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold that the real recipe of government was, How to do it.  Then would the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular field-day of the occasion.  Then would he come down to that house with a slap upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that the Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter, but was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this matter.  Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that, although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and wholly right, it never was so right as in this matter.  Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone, and never approached this matter.  Then would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution Office sitting below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the Circumlocution Office account of this matter.  And although one of two things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say of which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted immaculate by an accommodating majority.

(Little Dorrit, Chapter 10, Charles Dickens) at Read Print 

I also found Cirumlocution Office , the blog of Tite Barnacle Esq.- "The Circumlocution Office has been procrastinating on behalf of the public sector for over 160 years. These pages reflect the thoughts of Tite Barnacle Esq., Chairman of the Board of Circumlocution." True to form, Tite made his last post on August 10, 2006 and has since gone circumlocuting.

And here is Andy Whitman , offering an insider view of the circumlocution office, in this instance, State of Ohio.

"I once spent six months redesigning the State of Ohio web site that is used to file unemployment claims. Fittingly, the State of Ohio used none of my suggested improvements, because obfuscation and consternation are valued more highly than clarity and ease of use. God knows that if the average Jobless Joe could actually navigate the site, then even more unemployed people might file for unemployment compensation, and we can't have that.

"Naturally enough, we start our tour of Bureaucratic Hell with the Login Screen (hereafter abbreviated as OH6423918O&C, OH for Ohio, 6423918 because random numbers are good, and O&C for Obfuscation and Consternation). Here the Blissfully Naive User (hereafter BNU), still actually expecting to receive money for his efforts, is encouraged to use either an existing login or create a new login. "Ah," the BNU thinks. "I'm new to this, so I'll create a new login." Already the faceless bureaucrats are snickering up their sleeves. After selecting "Create a new login" the BNU is instructed to enter a login ID and a PIN. And here's where the real fun starts...."

It gets better. Read on.