July 13, 2018 at 4:24 pm (Artists and Writers, Personal Bookshelf)
Tags: C. P. Cavafy, Fridays, nostalgia, poetry
from “Gray” (1917)
Those gray eyes will have lost their charm — if he’s still alive;
that lovely face will have spoiled.
Memory: keep them the way they were.
And, memory, whatever you can bring back of that love,
whatever you can, bring back tonight.
July 10, 2018 at 11:51 pm (Books, Explorers, Family, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: history, Redwood City, writing process
1000 sets were printed of this massive series.
Self has Copy No. 179 on her MacBook Air.
60 volumes.
She does all her writing in son’s room, where daily she looks at the map of the Philippines that’s been hanging there for over two decades. She doubts if son even knows the names of the two main islands, Luzon and Mindanao. This is self’s failing.
No woman is mentioned in the first nine volumes.
Later, there is a decree about educating the sons of Spanish civil officials. And in volume 10, a mention of nuns.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
July 8, 2018 at 4:08 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Insomnia, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: AWP, poetry
At the last AWP Book Fair, self saw a familiar face at the Word Works table: Karen Alenier of Brooklyn. Self hung around and ended up buying a few books, one of which was Bad Names for Women, by Hilary Tham.
Tham is no longer with us, but her book is, and it is wonderful.
Mrs. Wei in Peking
All my life I’ve wanted to see
this Ten Thousand Li Great Wall,
Now I am sixty-five, too old for change
and Communism, the Malaysian Visa Office
permits I visit the land of my ancestors,
Oh, my arthritic knees! This wall was built
for mountain goats! The Emperor’s soldiers —
perched on the edge of the world, wanting
to sow rice and children, making do
with mulled wine against snow and ghost voices
wailing in the stones. Poor dead soldiers —
their breaths chill the stone, the summer wind,
I feel it. The Wall is haunted.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
July 8, 2018 at 1:42 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, discoveries, Events, Philippine literature, poetry, praise, Readings, Saturday
Met her at the reading put together by Linda Nietes of Philippine Expressions (San Pedro, CA) in March.
Been reading her collection, Primates From an Archipelago: Poems (Rabbit Fool Press), off and on ever since. The back has blurbs from Melissa Roxas and Jennifer Tseng (both of whom self has never read; adding to the “To Read” pile!)
The book is divided into four sections: Scattered Islands, Reclamation, Scattered Cities, and Smog.
From the poem Months, for Napoleon Lustre:
I.
Essex said it perfect:
It is easier to be furious than yearning.
You belong to tribes of warriors and outlaws.
Many who are now dying or just waiting like you.
As I sit here by your bed looking at your sleeping body,
I wonder how long your fury can sustain you.
Published 2017 by Rabbit Fool Press: http://www.rabbitfoolpress.com
Enthralling, powerful collection.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
July 5, 2018 at 7:26 am (Books, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: bestsellers, book lists, fantasy, His Dark Materials, history, Japanese writers, novel, Philip Pullman, reading lists, Robert Harris, summer, thrillers, translation, travel books
By now it should be clear how much self loves constructing lists. And book lists best of all.
Self set herself a goodreads Reading Challenge of 32 books, which is pretty ambitious considering last year she didn’t make her challenge goal of 26 books.
Nevertheless.
Books Read This Year (in the order of their Goodreads Average Rating)
Today, self went poring over her recommended reading list and discarded a list called “Recommended Summer Reading” (downloaded from a literary website). Summer is practically half over and by the time she gets to the books on that list, it will be winter.
On her To-Read list 2018 are a biography of Daphne du Maurier and three du Maurier novels. She hopes she can get to them soon. She wishes Steinbeck weren’t so engaging because he is really slowing down her reading rate. Before she began Travels with Charley she read an average of a book a week.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers.
June 30, 2018 at 3:40 pm (Books, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: Just published, Miami University Press, poetry, Saturday, summer
excerpt from Tanka Notebook, in the collection Climbing into the Orchestra (2017)
On the sidewalk a giant onion perfectly peeled
tucked in a plastic baggie and still fresh
three days after I notice it.
Keith Tuma teaches at Miami University (Ohio), where he edits the Miami University Press. Recent books include On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes (Salt, 2011).
June 30, 2018 at 3:15 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: book lists, historical fiction, John Steinbeck, memoir, nonfiction, novel, Philip Pullman, reading lists, summer, Tim O'Brien, translation, travel books
Self has been reading blazing fast, ever since she began Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, vol. 1 of The Book of Dust, in late March. The last week of March, and through April and May, she was on such a tear. After La Belle Sauvage, she read all of His Dark Materials, then moved on to childhood classics like Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, Tove Jansson’s exquisite The Summer Book, two first novels (As Lie Is to Grin by Simeon Marsalis and Mikhail and Margarita by Julie Lekstrom Himes, both excellent), and two books by Tim O’Brien (In the Lake of the Woods gutted her. In fact, she can’t stop thinking about it)
Since beginning Travels with Charley, however, she’s been moving at a glacial pace. It took her forever just to get through the Jay Parini introduction, and she’s just on p. 17.
She almost put the book aside last night, because it suddenly struck her that the kind of problems a man might encounter while traveling alone through America are very different from the kind of problems self experiences when she travels alone — self has traveled through not just America, but through Asia and Europe — and she is usually alone. It gets harder with every passing year. Security seems more suspicious (so many stamps on her passport!), people are less kind (or maybe self has just become more paranoid), and she’s definitely become more impatient. For one thing, she hates delays of any sort, and she hates flying because it’s so dehumanizing.
On p. 17, Steinbeck shares one of his underlying reasons for undertaking this trip, and she understands:
Travel is one way to resist the gravitational pull of age. It’s like being young again because everything is new, and you can still be surprised, on a daily basis.
(Note: Self was taken aback that Steinbeck viewed himself as a kind of Ernest Hemingway manly man. She’s always thought of him as ‘gentle.’ He might even be insulted by that description.)
Onward!
Self can’t believe summer is officially here. Time moves so fast. Soon, she’ll have a harvest of figs and plums from her backyard:
Stay tuned.
June 27, 2018 at 11:42 pm (Books, Explorers, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Places)
Tags: Canada, history, writing process
Self has always been fascinated by explorers, which is why she’s writing her novel about 18th century missionaries. She also has a very long story (32 pages currently, and nowhere near done) about an alien invasion in the Bering Sea. That story is all about Ice, but every day she reads various scientific reports about the disappearing glaciers so she feels mild concern that if she takes too long to finish this story, the context of the physical setting will cease to make any sense.
Today, she reads about the Penny and Barnes ice caps on Baffin Island, and about the Laurentide ice sheet that once covered much of North America. She learns that Baffin Island was known to the 11th century Norse of Greenland and Iceland, and that Baffin Island is postulated to be the Helluland of Viking sagas.
She also reads up on Sir John Franklin. The two ships that were lost during his fourth and final Arctic expedition were named the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus. The HMS Erebus was a 372-ton Heclaclass bomb vessel, built in Wales in 1826. The wreck has been located, in Queen Maud Gulf. The wreck of the HMS Terror lies under the water of Terror Bay. (Who names ships Erebus and Terror? Isn’t that like asking for trouble?)
She reads that Georgian Bay has 30,000 islands. Fresh in her mind is the fate of Kat, in the novel she just finished reading, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. Who sets off alone in a small boat and becomes lost and lost and more lost.
She learns about the Jesuit mission of Saint-Marie, founded on Lake Huron in the 17th century.
She reads about Lewis and Clark and about rivers like the Columbia and the Hood, which she has seen, long ago, on a driving trip north that started out in San Francisco and hugged the coast of Oregon and Washington.
And she also reads about Celtic and Norse mythology, in a book she found in son’s room.
So many books, so little time!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
June 24, 2018 at 2:43 am (Books, Explorers, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History)
Tags: history, The Philippines
The vessels are called balutu and are made from a single hollowed-out log or trunk. Although they have little cargo capacity because the sides are low in the water, they are very light. This is because there are some artisans (referred to as pandays, a generic term for all crafters) who make them so graceful and of such elegant lines that they say of them that they are like arrows.
June 18, 2018 at 4:39 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended)
Tags: Cambodia, Cambodian writers, Mondays, politics, reading lists, South-East Asia, translation, war literature
from Exodus
— translated from the Cambodian by Ken McCullough
Once the Blackcrows had usurped the power
they started to evacuate people from Phnom Penh
they threw patients through hospital windows
(women in labor and the lame), drove tanks
over them then bulldozed them under.
The poem Exodus is part of the collection Sacred Vows, a bilingual edition of U Sam Ouer’s poetry, published by Coffee House Press.
This is self’s companion reading to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s stories about his experiences as a grunt during the Vietnam War.
O’Brien and U Sam Oeur, in Southeast Asia at roughly the same time, each oblivious of the other. But afterward, what great literature they both produced.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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| anthropologist on Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge… |
| Cee Neuner on Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge… |
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