Teaser quote: The ants all gathered ’round and said, Ah-hah, you are justly served for being such a lazybones! Now starve, shithead.
On Æsop’s Fables
Two microreviews for Rhino: Jonathan Swift + Vanessa Couto Johnson
Teaser quote, from the Couto Johnson review: Now, the first thing a beginner would do with this format is decide it’s uninteresting to have all the prose stanzas be end-stopped. Indeed, beginners only choose forms so they can immediately make them more “interesting” by defeating every last molecule of reason for having the form in the first place. VCJ is not like that. She selected this form because of what it does; then she proceeds to exploit its potential.
[originally posted Monday 5 November 2018]
On Czesław Miłosz
(photo from Miłosz's h.s. yearbook)
Teaser quote: Yer daddy is yer daddy.
[originally posted Wednesday 24 October 2018]
Time Warps Are Real and What You Should Do About It
Teaser quote: “I been reading eight hours? Seems like I been sitting here maybe ninety minutes….”
[originally posted Wednesday 10 October 2018]
Review of Chelsey Minnis’s Baby, I Don’t Care
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: This is probably the most pleasurable and re-readable book of poems that’s gonna come out, this decade.
[originally posted Friday 5 October 2018]
Davenport’s Mao
Teaser quote: See how these bums operate? They don’t know Chinese, but they know something. They always know something, and they make that something seem like everything.
[originally posted Wednesday 26 September 2018]
Baby Talk
Teaser quote: In one of my poems I call babies “the crying people.” Heard plenty of that. The ones that said things were a bit older. The tiny ones gurgle.
[originally posted Wednesday 12 September 2018]
Subscribe to Book Post
Book Post seems to be cool. I subscribed. Maybe something there for you, too?
Teaser quote: By subscribing to Book Post you not only treat yourself to two first-rate book reviews a week, direct to your in-box (starting September 10), but support a more healthy reading environment where writers are paid, data is not mined, independent bookstores are sustained, and readers are encouraged to come together across the land around books and ideas. Now through September 10 you can get a one-year subscription at the bargain-basement price of $30.
Until September 10 however our Book Post Summer Vacation continues, with all our posts for free: Padgett Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, Joy Williams, Geoffrey O’Brien, Michael Robbins, and more to come! So please sign up, follow, enjoy, and share; help us make this a lasting and wide-ranging project.
[originally posted Tuesday 4 September 2018]
Microreview of Zen Master Yunmen: His Life and Essential Sayings
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Someone asked Master Yunmen, “What is the absolute concentration that comprehends every single particle of dust?” The Master replied, “Water in the bucket, food in the bowl.” [= Blue Cliff Record §50; Record of Serenity §99; Dōgen’s Sanbyakusoku §158].
[originally posted Wednesday 5 September 2018]
Microreview of The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, by Isabella Bird
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: I know what you’re thinking. Rather than drop $112 on the Folio version, why not get a copy of the original John Murray, 1899—gotta be cheaper than $112, right? Wrong. First editions of that little guy will run you twice that. There might be some way around this, but I haven’t found it. It appears to me that the Folio version is the one to beat.
[originally posted Wednesday 5 September 2018]
Ovidian Taste Test
Teaser quote: You probably know it’s no easy thing, judging between rival verse translations, especially when they were produced before the 19th century. The good news has always been that it hardly matters how difficult a task is, when no one’s gonna do it. Easy, hard: comes to the same thing. Yet somebody has to go in there. Somebody born after 1960.
[originally posted Wednesday 29 August 2018]
Pop Songs in English, Written by Speakers of Swedish
Teaser quote: Look, I have my ABBA book right here—541 pages excluding the index. You wanna know where ABBA learned their English? High school. That, and Beatles records.
[originally posted Wednesday 15 August 2018]
Five Public Cases
Teaser quote: Marianne Moore is to prosody what the Marquis de Sade was to holding hands and sharing a milkshake.
[originally posted Monday 13 August 2018]
The time has come...
Microreview of Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: It is a vast set of numbered anecdotes, very largely consisting of smart replies (sometimes by children), exemplary acts of generosity or respectfulness, remarkable incidents involving drunkenness and/or nudity, preposterous behavior in general, deceitfulness, mercy, taunting, ostentation, supernaturally quick judgment—and so on.
[originally posted Wednesday 8 August 2018]
Devin King interviews me for Iowa Review
Here.
Teaser quote: This is why surfing is a good metaphor for this. It’s not like you learn nothing by watching videos of other people doing it. But to stand on the water yourself, to cooperate with the particulars of the moment—to resist, risk, exploit, find, reject—that’s how you become a surfer. I’ll stop putting on airs now.
[originally posted Friday 27 July 2018]
Two micro-reviews, one of the new edition of Rolfe Humphries’ Ovid/Metamorphoses, and one of W.M. Thackston’s Sa‘di/Gulistan
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: It’s a book for everybody. As much as an axe helve is fitted to the grasp of the human hand, this text is fitted for the human mind. Which is to say it’s 100% homely anecdotes, parables, witty comebacks, all of ’em numbered, crystal clear, ramjam with images. Every metaphor is spot-on and memorable. Listen: it wouldn’t have been continuously quoted by every Persian-speaker for 760 years unless it was something special.
[originally posted Tuesday 3 July 2018]
Trite drivel that doesn’t need to exist
Teaser quote: If you ignore this principle, if you write a book, say, that is formidable nine ways from Tuesday, piled high with sophistication and impressive this ’n’ that, but which you don’t actually like, then what ends up happening is you helplessly side with the people who don’t care about your work. Next stop is the bottle.
[originally posted Tuesday 19 June 2018]
I like the way Penguin Classics looked in the ’40s
Thank you to my #1 Taipei Book Operative, Daniel Bosch.
A New Revision of Guang Yun (Song Edition) with Cross-referencing Pronunciations (Le Jin Books, 2010):
