Doc,
please look.
My neck
is stuck.
It goes this far,
no more.
I hear you,
but it’s not,
no, it is not a metaphor…
Egretious: A Poem
or, what happens when an egret spends too much time on Twitter
The river is polluted,
So muddy taste the trout.
The cricket chirp is muted.
The grubs are running out.
The heron eyes my minnow.
The beaver’s on the run.
There droops a dying willow
Wilting in the too-hot sun.
The winter comes too early.
The springtime comes too late.
You feel the crisis, surely;
The lurch of doomful fate…
Noodle Set: A Poem
Udon.
Under a blue-
tiled roof, stomp the dough like
wine grapes to the west. Chew, sip, gone.
Udon…
Read moreThe Hedgehog and the Chestnut: A Poem
Said the hedgehog to the chestnut,
”Spines like yours hold me in thrall!”
Said the chestnut to the hedgehog
No acknowledgement at all.
Said the hedgehog to the chestnut,
”Bristles like that blow my mind!”
Said the chestnut to the hedgehog
Not a compliment in kind…
Last But Not Least, Slovak Novel(la)s in English #42: That Alluring Land
In all fairness, this should have been “Slovak Novels in English #1” (that honor went somewhat haphazardly to The Year of the Frog instead), because it is the very first work of Slovak literature in English that I ever read.
The year was 1998, and the discovery was online used booksellers. Those who came of age after the internet revolution and yet are bibliophiles cannot even fathom the limitations on voracious readers then. We had what bookstores physically carried—and even if a well-curated collection beyond the boilerplate bestsellers, there’s just only so much a Waldenbooks in the mall could stock, much less make a profit on selling. Libraries had more range, but inevitable limitations as well. I remember having heard of books that I knew I’d never find, or seeing “Also by this author” in beloved books and knowing it was a lost cause. Even used bookstores tended to focus on mass market paperbacks in high-volume genres like mystery or romance.
So really, you just can’t fathom what wonder opened up when you could type in a title and author—find the book—and buy it…
Read moreOne More Excerpt from "A-Tumblin' Down"
Sunday afternoons found Donald on the old corduroy sofa, inert, a glass of sweet tea shedding tears of condensation all over a coffee table too wretched to protect with coasters. Most of his parishioners would be in the same position, though alert, not inert, a six-pack near at hand, suffering through the spectacle of the Angels creaming the Yankees with a superstitious attention that reminded Donald of Luther’s dictum: if only I could pray the way my dog looks at a piece of meat. He accepted the dictum but not the beer—there are limits to what post-Holiness piety can enjoy in good conscience. Communion wine was his only indulgence on that score, and he suffered no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues for it. Occasionally Donald considered spreading a rumor that he was a recovering alcoholic, as that seemed to be the only acceptable excuse for abstinence. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie.
As a rule, baseball was just compelling enough to absorb Donald’s depleted post-church consciousness, but on this day, by the innocent fault of the Sunday School, he was instead back in the grip of his mental debate with Grandfather Abney.
After the service, Donald had led Bible study for the adults upstairs in the sanctuary while the children trooped downstairs to sing with Mrs. Forrad and Ms. Gross. Afterwards they split up into makeshift classrooms partitioned by dividers hanging from the ceiling. When the education hour was over, Pastor Donald came downstairs to pray everyone safe and healthy through the week ahead before the mass exodus to baseball or football or lunch or shopping in Kuhsota.
But when he arrived downstairs, the children were twitching with excitement, the teachers beaming proudly. Before he could even open his mouth to ask, he was informed that the whole Sunday School had prepared a special treat for him, and wasn’t it lucky that he had chosen Joshua out of all the lessons to preach on that morning? The teachers had decided that chapter 24 was a bit abstract for their small charges, but it was a great opportunity to cover the battle of Jericho—a real favorite when they were kids, how come it never came up in the Sunday lessons?—and they had a song to go with it. Maybe Pastor Donald knew the song. Would he like to sing along?
Of course he did, and of course he would…
Read moreIntroducing "A-Tumblin' Down"
Donald rose with the sun, whatever the time of year. At the summer solstice that meant quarter to five and by Christmas nearly seven. Late August was a comfortable sort of time with a reasonable wake-up call of six o’clock. He made his own coffee. Carmichael scoffed at the “swill,” as she called it, that fueled him, and would not suffer her own coffee, brewed from beans dutifully toted northwards by her discriminating City parents or purchased at no small expense from the Shibboleth Co-op, to be wasted on his tastebuds. He was amused by her snobbery and made a point of smacking his lips on his “ditchwater” (another term of disapprobation) whenever she saw him drink it.
On this particular morning, the pleasure of sunrise, coffee, and quiet vanished the moment Donald flipped open his pastoral agenda to find the next Sunday’s lessons.
He should have seen it coming. It’s not like he hadn’t come across it before. Donald was on his fourth trip through the three-year lectionary, a curiosity that remained unfathomable to his assorted cousins and uncles, for whom there was no preaching but expository preaching, straight through one book of the Bible at a time, one verse at a time. Donald had in fact always taken wary note of this particular Sunday, the Fourteenth after Pentecost in Year B, for its distinction of featuring the one and only passage from the book of Joshua in the whole cycle…
Read moreSlovak Novels in English #41: The Bride
This is my second review of a work by Grosman, and one of a by-now not-insignificant number of Slovak novels not actually composed in Slovak.
Grosman was Slovak, and that was his primary language; moreover, as in The Shop on Main Street, the novel (or really novella—at 113 pp. and print the size of a YA novel from the 70s, I’d bet it’s not much over 20,000 words in length) is set in eastern Slovakia. Grosman’s adult career as a writer and film producer took place in Prague, however, where Czech was naturally the language of choice.
However, Grosman was not in residence in Prague when this novel was first published in the original language. The year of publication was 1969, but the year before was the Prague Spring, followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion…
Read moreOde to Sakura: A Poem
Ode to Sakura
The blossoms that launched ten
thousand haiku!
O poets, how can I
compete with you?
You’ve already nailed
impermanence,
and mujō illusions,
and fleeting scents.
There’s naught left to say on
the shades of pinks,
The florally flurries and
cascading winks…
What I Learned from Agatha Christie, Part 3: What Would Happen Thereafter
Passenger to Frankfurt is not exactly Christie’s most beloved novel. It’s a thriller, rather than a straight-up detective mystery, for one thing. In my recent quest to read all her novels, I discovered that she peppered a fair few thrillers in with the mysteries. She was never as good in this genre, but I can appreciate her need to change things up to keep her writing and imagination fresh.
That’s not the only problem with PTF, though. It came out in 1970, toward the end of her life and career, and it’s beyond question that her powers were waning at that point. (However, in all fairness, I think her silliest thriller of all was The Big Four, which was published in 1927, right as she was hitting her stride.) Christie fans know full well that she was of a conservative turn of mind, very irritable about high taxes, and generally unhappy at the drift of things, socially and culturally. That really shows through in PTF. But this too should be qualified: a novel like Third Girl reckons with what has become of “young people these days” and takes them at face value. It’s not all invective.
You can read a very thorough description of what passes for PTF’s plot on Wikipedia. The opening sequence in which the protagonist trades places with someone who is convinced that she will be killed if she takes her flight is one of the best in Christie’s work—it’s a shame the rest of the book didn’t follow through on the initial premise.
But here’s where it gets interesting. For one thing, the titular city is Frankfurt. An obvious choice for an international flight hub, but I can’t help but wonder if more lies behind it: namely, the so-called Frankfurt school, which unleashed Critical Theory in all its corrosive glory on the world. That would be utterly speculative on my part—except that in this book Christie actually mentions by name Herbert Marcuse (the leading proponent of the Frankfurt school)! Who knew that she was keeping up with, at that time, arcane philosophical movements? …
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