Readings Week 52

….Time to slowly leave the kitchen and get back into my reading chair.

Update: 25 December 2017

Read:  The Dublin Review: 4 issues per year containing first-rate writitng from Ireland and elsewhere. Essay: The Tourist and the Journalist by D. Ralph (Ass. Prof Sociology Trinity College, Dublin).

Read: Path to Power (R. Caro) I’ve been listening to the 1st vol of Caro’s award winning biography series about Pres Lyndon Baines Johnson. Started on 06 Dec and hope to finish this week.  I am surprised how little I know about this man.

Finish date: 25 December 2017              On Elizabeth Bishop by C. Tóibin

Genre: non-fiction
Rating: A
Review: Biography, analysis of Bishop’s poems, and her world (trauma losing her parents, childhood in homes of family, friendships male (R. Lowell) and female (Lotte, Marianne Moore).
The fact that the world was there was enough for Bischop and she describes all that is around her. This was her defense…. so she can avoid descriptions of herself. #MustRead if you are interested in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems.

Read: On Elizabeth Bishop (C. Toibin) – biography, analysis of some of her poems, and descriptions of Bishop’s world so she can avoid descriptions of herself.  #MustRead before I try to read Bishop’s poems.

Read: Bishop’s poem “North Haven,” her elegy to Robert Lowell. In six, five-line stanzas the poet composed a masterpiece of remembrance that stands among the finest evocations of a Maine island ever written.

Read: The Sun December 2017  (ad-free independent magazine, stories, poems, interviews, essays) – Read short story Believers by Kate Osterloh. I found this short story…a bit too long! Not especially interesting to me. 15 ch each alternating  about ‘HE’ and SHE’. Narrator is flat, detached and not one line of dialogue. in comparison to Dave Ralph’s essay which I loved…this was a boring read.

Read: short story by Poe Ballantine. He  is a fiction and nonfiction writer (1955)  known for his novels and especially his essays, many of which appear in The Sun. This short story that was very entertaining….a bit more polished than Believers. Poe Ballantine wrote Mining the Lost Years. I liked this quote: “ Mining the lost years….or how to take the dirty coal of your life (breakups, breakdowns, shattered dreams, sickness, death, misdeeds, indiscretions and other ringing failures….and compress it into diamonds!”

Read: Poem by M. Cochrane    Stage Four  in The Sun.  The form is 37 lines with no paragraph breaks. I see that Cochrane uses ‘ I believe…”  repeated 6 x . I will read the poem with these words as a ‘mental break’ (lines then divided 4-15-4-4-10). Cochrane lists so many things he believes in (therapy , mindfullness, holy water and the saints….etc) but the powerful ending made the poem worth reading! It is what the poet makes us as readers think of ourselves. I remembered my own ‘lemonade small business on a summer street curb’!

( good feeling!)

Mick Cochrane is professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College, where he has three times been named Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Update: 26 December 2017 –  reading The New Yorker 18-25 December

Update: 27 December 2017

Read: poem  Emotional Astronomer by Bronwyn Lovell  in Australian Literary Magazin Meanjin and the poem spoke to me instantly. She has been shortlisted for the Fair Australia Prize 2017  . There is something unique, something hidden in the images….something  but have not been able to put my finger on it yet!  This one needs more reading and thinking. Bronwyn Lovell’s website.

• Wordsworth believed that the poem is the record of a great emotion,
• …later ‘recollected in tranquility’.

Emotional Astronomer

cares for telescopes like mechanical pets

camps out with cameras and an aching neck

tints torchlight, dims his van brothel-red

waits for the Earth to move, the moon to set

props a director’s chair for the fade to black

can’t factor his children’s resentment

accepts the conditions, won’t ask the sky why

will not love a nebula less the tenth time

gets teary at a clear viewing of Alpha Centauri

feels things to which his wife won’t relate

needs no chart to plot the now fragile arc

of a retired accountant’s amateur star—

knows meteors will rain down consolation:

Jupiter a river pebble, Saturn a silky stone

Readings week 51

• Between grocery shopping and cooking…
• I’ve litte time for ‘ sit down serious reading’.
• Here are a few snippets, thoughts while making pumpkin pie (Mom’s recipe)
• and  …mushroom lasagna! (Cookbook Plenty by  Y. Ottolenghi)

1. #SNAFU in the Xmas kitchen….chilled dough ready for pumpkin pie
2. …. and I can’t find my rolling pin!
3. PS:  I can eat Pumpkin Pie for breakfast!

1. This  dish took me 4 hours to make:
2. 4 different cheeses – béchemal sauce – chop 2 lbs mushrooms + 15 onions
3. pre-soak lasagna pasta….and then put all this together in layers!
4. I deserve a ‘y-uuuge’ glass of wine after this culinary extravaganza!
5. Ready for the oven….XMAS Mushroom Lasagna!
6. I used every frying pan, dish, spatula and bowl in my kitchen
7. to make this…I’m exhausted!
8. Happy Holiday!

UPDATE 17-18 December 2017

1. Read: ISLAND  magazine (nr 151)
2. This is a Tasmanian Literary publication sent to me all the way from Port Hobart!
3. Read: editorial by Geordie Williamson
4. Read: poem Munchian O by Mededith Wattison.
5. Re-read the poem   Munchian O   this morning with my coffee: ..it makes very little sense to me except the allusions to E. Munch ‘The Scream‘ and Bruegel’s ‘Landscape With the Fall of Icarus‘. I’m sorry …I really tried to like it!
6. Read: personal essay by Erin Hortle “How Do You Make Them See You Belong” (feminist issues in the middle of Tasmanian surf culture). This essay was so-so….issue seemed trivial to me.  Erin is trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill in my opinion…but it is important for her.
7. Read: The Writer at Present Interview  by Benjamin Law with author Heather Rose.
8. She is the winner  of Stella Prize 2017  book: the  Museum of Love Modern Love. She describes her journey while writing her prize winning book.
9. Read:  2 personal essays by husband and wife team on their decision to move to Tasmania from Melbourne. These were excellent  personal essays by  Damon Young and Ruth Quibell.

Film: finished  short series HBO The Young Pope (Jude Law nominated Golden Globe 2018) ..I spent 6 hours watching the last episodes and enjoyed it but felt still as if I was wasting my reading time. Watching films and series on HBO or Netflix just feel like a ‘sugar buzz’  and later I come crashing down. On the other hand…books keep me afloat for days.

Read: The New Yorker with the new app “The New Yorker Today”.

Daily shouts:    Xmas grocery shopping/cooking got you down? #JoinTheClub
But I have just been jolted into ‘Ho-ho-ho” spirit @NewYorker “Life Hacks for the Reluctant Home Cook” (@tasneemraja)   Tasneem Raja’s  article has given me #CulinaryShame “Astronauts in space find time to make their own stock. What’s your excuse?”

Read:  Meanjin  – an Australian a literary magazine

1. Essay:  Two Fires  by T. Birch – winner of the  P.White Award 2017
2. He is the first first indigenous writer to win the Patrick White Award
3. His newest novel is Ghost River (2015)
4. A collection of impressions  and people Birch met during a
5. 2 week residency in Canada, Banff Cenre for Arts and Creativity
6. …and Christmas Hills Readers and Writers Festival 2017.
7. The history of a stolen generation in Canada…sound haunting.
8. Tony Birch makes many comparisons (CAN vs AUS) and its history
9. …of dispossession and attempt to destroy the indigenous peoples.
10. Essay was very readable but did not ‘wow’- me.

Read:  Quarterly Essay, vol. 68;  White, Hugh,  28 November 2017  (Australian)

This is worth the time it took to read….2 hrs!

1. Essay: , ‘Without America: Australia in the New Asia’
2. Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies
3. ….at the Australian National University.
4. Stop assuming that USA is going to dominate Asia forever
5. Stop  assuming that USA will keep Australia safe.
6. China is now so strong and ambitious that USA under Trump..so weak
7. that USA will cease to be a  significant player in Asia.
8. Australia must prepare itself for this transformation.
9. I loved White’s explanation of two world powers put their rivals to the test!
10. “classic power-political salami-slicing”
11. “…each slice of the salami might be insignificant,
12. Washington looks weak if it can’t or won’t stop China taking
13. …one slice after another, and China by contrast looks strong and resolved…”
14. OUCH!
15. “Rex Tillerson has proved to be the worst secretary of state in living memory,
16. ….and the overpraised General James Mattis in Defense
17. ….has failed to bring coherence to the administration’s strategy.”
18. WHAT?
19. Who would have thought that Indonesia will be a
20. ..VERY POWERFUL country, second only to China?
21. Thank you, Hugh White for opening my eyes….about China and Indonesia!!
22. I think TRUMP should put this essay
23. ‘Without America’ in his bedside night table….
24. …his TBR!!
25. Conclusion:
26. 40 years ago Australia managed a ‘post-alliance’ transition with Britain.
27. Now Australia’s task in the next few years will be…doing the same with America!
28. China’s rise is a fact and isn’t going away.
29. This will require Australia to rethink a lot of things,
30. ….to make some hard choices, and perhaps
31. …to pay some heavy costs.
32. #ExcellentMustRead essay!

Pre- Christmas movies: 

1. Babette’s Feast ( Best Foreign Film Oscar 1988) –  classic favorite
2. Casablanca   –  classic love  WWII story (3 Oscars – best picture, screenplay, director 1944)
3. Going My Way –  7 Oscars 1944;  Oscar for best actors B. Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald #MustSee
4. Hail Caesar – picked this up at the library….don’t waste your time!
5. Mr. Holmes – great actor Ian Mckellen…..despite this talented thespian the movie was boring!

Readings week 50

10.12.2017:

1. Today I just read anything I came across.
2. I treated myself to some subscriptions for literary magazines and reviews.  
3. If  I just keep reading the same ol’ same ol’  classic fiction
4. ….I will be missing out on all that is to be discovered!
   

1. Read The Song of Hiawatha (just the last verse) by Longfellow lovely!
2. Read In Darkling Thrust by T. Hardy…very nice.
3. Read Tim Lilburn Where  – The Malahat Review nr 200 –  excellent
4. Read Tim Lilburn Shame –  The Malahat Review nr 200 – disappointment

Tim Lilburn:

1. images with emotion…but it did not brush off on me.
2. Read Julie Paul  Esquimalt Road – couldn’t relate the first time….later it sunk in.
3. Julie Paul has written collections of short stories that are on my Xmas wish-list:
4. The Pull of the Moon (2014) and The Rules of the Kingdom (2017)

Julie Paul:

1. Read The Burning Tree and Wanting It Darker by Canadian Ben Ladouceur
2. Both poems feel like  mèh….but I just have to read them a few more times.
3. On the General Being of Lostness by Canadian Jeff Latosik
4. …again this one  needs more reading.
5. How do these men win poetry prizes?
6. These poems were in Poetry Magazine, December 2017

11.12.2017:

Read this poem… just beautiful!

Unsaid (Dana Gioia)

1. So much of what we live goes on inside–
2. The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
3. Of unacknowledged love are no less real
4. For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
5. Is always more than what we dare confide.
6. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

1. I managed to learn the first stanza by heart…
2. …The Darkling Thrush by T. Hardy.
3. I keep reciting it to the cats…and they love it!
4. Later I read my first Marianne Moore poem Poetry first published in 1919.
5. Just think…it took nearly 100 years before this poem crossed my path.
6. What more am I missing?

Marianne Moore

13.12.2017

1. Read Yeats’s poem: Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (beautiful)
   
2. Read Browning’s poem: Meeting at Night (beautiful)
3. Ordered: 1 yr sub to ‘The Dublin Review’ – 4  issues per year
4. I….want to read more Irish!
5. Reading: Why Poetry?
6. I’m introduced to many new poems ( …practically all poems are new to me).
7. This morning: I felt a Funeral, in my Brain by Emily Dickinson.
8. I learned about Adrienne Rich and her legacy.
9. Her poem ‘Rape’ is in the book.
   
10. I could not resist ordering  Anne Carson‘s book
11. …Men in the Off Hours: book of shorter poems .
12. I feel I am catching up on all the my years ‘without poetry’.

UPDATE: 15.12.2017

1. Finished book Why Poetry?  (M. Zapruder, 2017).
2. It was wonderful.

Matthew Zapruder:

1. Tried to read Tim Lilburns’ Shame once again…I give up on this guy!
2. The Irish Times and a section ‘Poem of the Day:
3. Read Martina Evans’s  poem
4. …Time Wounds All Heels – her memories yet I’m unimpressed.
   
5. Read Kevin Higgins poem Exit, a Brexit –   (quirky political satire…it works!)
6. Read Daragh Bradish poem Bacarolle – …don’t feel anything for this poem, nothing!

UPDATE: 16.12.2017

1. I will re-read 3 poems from the Irish Times once more.
2. Evans’s  poem still just has a hint of nostalgia
3. …but not enough to  give one a skin shiver.
4. Higgins’s poem is  very funny (satire)  and Bradish just fizzled out again!

Kevin Higgins:

Exit, for Brexit  (Kevin Higgins)

There will be no more thunderstorms
sent across the Channel by the French,
no acid rain floating in from Belgium.
Pizza Hut will offer a choice of
Yorkshire Pudding or Yorkshire Pudding.

You’ll spend the next twenty-seven bank holidays
dismantling everything you ever bought from IKEA.
The electric shower your plumber,
Pavel, put in last week will be taken out
and you’ll be given the number of a bloke
who’s pure Billericay. Those used to caviar
will have jellied eels forced
down their magnificent throats.
Every fish and chip shop
on the Costa del Sol will in time
be relocated to Ramsgate or Carlisle.

All paving stones laid by the Irish
will be torn up to make work
for blokes who’ve been on the sick
since nineteen seventy-six.
Those alleged to be involved in secretly
making spaghetti bolognaise
will be arrested and held
in a detention centre near Dover. Sausage dogs
will be put in rubber dinghies
and pointed in the general direction
of the Fatherland. Neatly sliced
French sticks topped with pâté
will make way for fried bread
lathered with Marmite.

There’ll be no more of those new
names for coffee your gran
can’t pronounce. The entire royal family
will be shipped back to Bavaria, with the exception
of the Duke of Edinburgh who’ll be given
a one-way ticket to Athens. Curry
will no longer by compulsory
after every twelfth pint of Stella,
which itself will only be available
by special permission of the Foreign Office.

We’ll give India back its tea, sit around increasingly
bellicose campfires in our rusting iron helmets,
our tankards overflowing with traditional Norse mead.