All things DFW

Federer both flesh and not

Fictional futures and conspicuously young

Other DFW works

The nature of fun - On writing

Period poetry

What the poets of this century might not be on this time. Poets of previous century can write of us imagining science fiction, or of the next century as historical fiction.

When I read that the book has poems on Titanic, I can see how news articles might have led people to imagine about it.

The coming urban century.

Rocky point

If someone can interest you in rocks like the layers of a cake, then its a geologist who will let you feel the thrill of his findings as he joins the dots. He gets us conversant in using stratigraphy of looking at the layer changes in the rocks.
The story under Rome is no less riveting than the many on/of it.
Now a geologist is not going to leave you without rubbing off a thing or two about his subject - potassium argon dating. Other than this method, geologists have also used fossils and microfossils.
Can you believe that Earth's magnetic field is reversing from time to time? Not once or twice, if you look at the changes of magnetic polarity, it looks like a bar code. You can study these things if you become a paleomagnetist.
Lie water cycle, there's a rock cycle with sedimentary on the surface rocks are bedded deep into earth to become metamorphic rocks which later emerge as volcanic rocks. Then part of the water cycle erodes these rocks to form sedimentary rocks.

Dec 18, 2009

Clash of the natures

Madame X by William Logan

Pale blossoms, chipped like tea cups in The War, The War

The placid tuna, hacked into agate slabs in The eels of the lagoon

Words

VEX, hex, SMASH, smooch by Constance Hale

In an American Airlines inflight magazine article, when I came across 'luckily', I felt how our sense of gratefulness never comes across the page. It has become like the overused just.

A vocabulary list is included in DFW's 'Both Flesh and Not'.

Storing summer

The Golden Road by Rachel Hadas

origin,journey, wound and destination in The pattern. It has been said that all stories are about a person going from one place to the other. Into this shuttling story, the poet adds the bump of wound into the journey element. A resultant journey to find the cure creates a web of story yarn. 

departure and arrival in On the ferry. The author's poetry deals with states, before-after. The narrator is always in a flux, travelling in a plane, on a ferry in which she lets her thoughts to travel too laying down conversation starters dormant.

The address book begins as a data management/organizer, in years if it does not fall out of use, it stocks the living, dead and the forgotten all in the same book.

Plot of Macbeth
No good deed goes unrewarded reminds me of good intentions being misunderstood.
Rear window
The language of women

That was another summer though. Life has some times that return. Birthday celebrations and seasons which rest like layers on the previous.

In After the end of summer,  a brown brook
'over and over in its water voice,
a voice born out of silence'
takes us to that moment of beauty spent solely with nature.

poet on The end of summer in Three poets.

Storing the season

Ill naw mean

From a family with values derived from the mind of Shihuangdi, the man who built the Wall and unified China come tales that remind me of 'Talk Thai: the Adventures of a Buddhist boy' in the situation of narrators with fresh of the boat parents.

In the times when Instagram and smartphones werent heard of, author Eddie Huang has been part of many things that would have made popular videos. Ousted out of various schools faster than annually, you can see the making of the mean boys - he and his friends who bond over hip-hop.

'I found myself. I rehabilitated myself'
I went into the book thinking that it is about food. The author ends up owning a restaurant just like his dad but the route he takes is rife with many imagination pumping street fights and meets with cops.

'I wanted to know if there was one person, one voice, one individual inside me.'
When in Taiwan airport, the author felt best at house, midway between his white America and Chinese Taiwan.

The author bangs into the stereotype culture wall and being called names for his ethnic looks. He veers off many times to be influenced by many 'most important' professors who recognise his talent.

Our response to culture is different based on the age we are exposed to it. The author's formative years form tales that turn into culture tapestry.

The transition of the voice from a child to the adult is maintained in the book.

How the book is a metabook

Like MLA(Modern Language Association)'s guidelines for bibliography, the author too has one.

David Shields, How Literature saved my Life. In later chapters, when it comes to his `Fifty-five works Iswear by', take for example:

Borges, Other Inquisitions. An investigation of otherness pretending to be mere miscellany.

In a strange way this note resonates with the book too with its web like miscellany and the `otherness' apparent in the quest of unifying the search in the many books.

If you look at life through the lens of death (lens of the book), everything would seem trivial. But still the trivial is not left unexamined. In between this apathy and scrutiny falls the authors study not limited to books but also to failed public heroes, Brown university, fictional superheroes.

A book about many books and writers. How other writers deal with death.The author is a self proclaimed ambivalent. Literature is his saviour and then its not. With his vast reading, the author is able to quote from a variety of sources. Sometimes the quotes steal the show. Sometimes they are out of place.

Many books mentioned in the book like ` This is not a novel', a book according to the author almost entirely out of other writers' lines. Atleast that book has the pleasure of recognition of the passages included. If we rdid `Wait don't tell me `for everything in the book it wouldn't be too fun. So even though there is the humility of not knowing much of the work alluded to in the book, the author has trapped himself into a construct like a never ending story where the magic is supposed to be in the million mirroring of a mostly empty diorama box.

One strength of the book is that even though no lines will stick with you. If you flip the pages, because of the miscellany, the aptness will hit your radar sometime.

The writer does achieve the `dubiety of the first person pronoun' that he wants to achieve by making the reader wonder if he/she is in between quotations.

Things I didn't know
Scout belt can be bought
How Tree of Codes book was made
Collage books

3/5

Write

Last book I loved

Poetry. Loving it while hating it.

Let the train move on

One Train May Hide another

This is the kind that would make me happy as a school going child taking a bus. If the bus in front just left and somehow there's another bus in the same direction.

From a simple observation, poet Kenneth Koch has moved to one of the most important situation in life. If you cant move on, never mind, let the train move on.

Appian Way

I missed reading the first line in parenthesis.

Being a poet, it is a given that this sign should first make him see how it translates to poetry.
You always have to wait for the train. Yield it says.
Wait for the line. One line may hide another thinks the optimist writer.

A jump to a personality shadowing another. Jumps back to his turf of words.
The path of things.

Valley of the var. Turns too hide things. Blind spot.
We only look for what we are waiting for. Think of a giant Lazy Susan or Baggage carousel. The bag has to be picked. All celestial things are on a carousel. To be is to be everywhere. Moving all the time.

PS: Today a group email was sent about a lost hairpin. This hairpin would be easy to find.

From Light to Dark and Back

A poetry exercise

Day 5

Poem: Homage to Yalta

Words in the order they appear in the poem:

Yalta
Chigorin Defense

washout. Have you felt the discomfort of being between knowing a word and guessing it from context? I have seen people use this word shortened to wash and never quite understood what they meant.

Livadia.  Cities inside us. The poem by Alberto Rios makes me wonder why he didnt choose a specific place as it would leave a better sense of belonging to a place and holding it in you too, when you move away. All cities might remain in you. But they would differ in how. Even without the specifics, the poet does not lose the reader. For one, he binds with them as the citizens of the city inside. The title is the foreshadow of the direction. When you say city, the mind wanders out. What is true of the places is true of the people.

Day 4 Joseph Brodsky

Today while watering the pothos which grows on only one side, the leaves that have been there for a long time, I realise that they wont long. An acceptance opposed to the eternal why should leaves fall and flowers die.

The unrelenting law
that happiness cant last

- For E.R, Joseph Brodsky

Pontus which 'remains unfrozen'.
frozen is such a cold, solid word that you first think of the shit down white and then clear it to imagine unfrozen.

exploded soundlessly, nymphs leap, 
The aural scape is charged

But no wind blows, ..slowly rising breakers

In an obvious state of calm, there is an upsurge welling.

I tend to write in terms of A caused B. The last para is a succession of things overthrowing a succession of other things. With the multitude/complex happenings, there is a benefit of texture.

Stereotypes

Title: Scandinavian Humor and Other Myths

I was interested in this book after an incident at a Scandinavian restaurant where we went to celebrate my friends Bday. We were overcharged. Seemed like the owner/mother was going to give it good to the son/cashier after we left. it also reminded me of an ad for a credit card where a son loses his customer and the mom is ready with her culinary weapons.

An Iceland person with a pile of books in a hand makes sense with a recent survey calling them the most reading.