Michael Ondaatje's best book: Anil's Ghost. (2000)
Am at the moment unable to speak well in any depths.
Unable to sieve my speech.
Toads jump out of my mouth.
Monday, 7 June 2010
Sunday, 18 April 2010
About Goodness
I've been reading about the Holocaust and came across a book which made an impression on me - less despair, more uplift.
One of the lessons which can be drawn from the Holocaust may be that if such horrendous evil is possible, amazing good must occasionally happen as well. The book is called Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, by Carol Rittner and Sandra Myers, eds. (NYU Press, 1986).
Of particular note: an entire village in France saved thousands. It is called Le Chambon, may it always be remembered for a blessing.
Also a Bavarian army officer called Major Julius Schmahling who saved many people in the Haute Loire. He is linked to the village and helped them.
One of the lessons which can be drawn from the Holocaust may be that if such horrendous evil is possible, amazing good must occasionally happen as well. The book is called Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, by Carol Rittner and Sandra Myers, eds. (NYU Press, 1986).
Of particular note: an entire village in France saved thousands. It is called Le Chambon, may it always be remembered for a blessing.
Also a Bavarian army officer called Major Julius Schmahling who saved many people in the Haute Loire. He is linked to the village and helped them.
Saturday, 17 April 2010
Receiving a revelation
Part I.
The wonderful city library and the joys of being an autodidact, at least as far as this poetry is concerned. It is so much fun to find things out for oneself.
From the library: two old tired books about Gerard Manley Hopkins, one an analysis of a selection of his poetry, (Landscape and Inscape, Vision and Inspiration in Hopkins's poetrey, by P. Milward, SJ and R Schoder, SJ, 1975) and another a collection with an introduction (Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edition, revised and enlarged, W H Gardner and N H MacKenzie, eds, 1967). Am learning The Windhover by heart. It is not in my main poetry book (Poetry of the English-Speaking World, R Aldington, ed., 1950), though others which I loved are - among them Pied Beauty, and In the Valley of the Elwy.
Today is Shabbat and on Shabbat I do not read about the Holocaust or other horrifying stories, nor do I work on the computer (It is now after dark, so officially no longer Shabbat).
Today for once there was absolutely nothing else to do. Always interesting to see what happens when nothing is planned. So: a nice long meditation, and a quiet morning lying on the sun-warmed patch on the floor, with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Peter was in his office, so I could read the poems out loud.
I was very happy.
I realise that the rest of the educated English-speaking world will know this poem. The more I read about Hopkins, the more interested I became. A Jesuit. A mystic. A great need for peace. An equally great love for nature. One of the commentaries said he had influenced the next generation's use of English.
Then a vigorous walk up Mt Kaukau with P and friends. I am fortunate.
Part II
I have not managed to keep up my blog writing, so a quick tour of recent reading:
A not good enough book by Amin Maalouf, entitled Baltasar's Odyssey, which is a voyage through parts of the Ottoman Empire and Europe in 1666, when many people believed that the end of the world was nigh. I don't know why he wrote it, except that it was published shortly after 2000, when people also worried about what would happen if all the computers stopped working.
I had the recurring feeling that he himself travelled along the same route and wrote in all the little details he noticed about people's behaviour in the 20th centurey into his book, adapting the material things around them to the 15th century. One of the reviews says "Sparkling and erudite". It did nothing for me.
Now quite different and a stunner: Peter Hobbs' The Short Day Dying (2005) - what a tour de force, and his first book too. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Best First Novel - I wonder who won that year, this book would have been hard to beat.
A well-meaning relatively uneducated man is struggling with his faith and his life. He writes in the style of the Bible, for that is all that he knows. Meaning, he never reads anything else. His syntax is Biblical and this is done with great skill. I found it wonderful. The character of this man is completely believable and his story is compelling.
Pushing Time Away: My grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna by Peter Singer (2003). This is the Peter Singer, the ethics specialist, writing about his family. I read it as part of research on Teresienstadt, which I promised a friend I would do for her. What a relief to read a book like this where someone remembers to put in the details that one wants to know, they did so and so, why did they choose to do that just then, and how did they go about it, that sort of stuff is often not covered well enough by people who experienced it. He has done thorough research, and I am grateful to him. Also: I recognise the feelings he describes - he went to the school where his grandfather taught and he says, I walked into the entrance hall, the same place my grandfather will have gone through many many times, it is unchanged...This is a recurring event through the book, an experience I had when I was in Nuremberg, My mother was here and here and here, I am standing on the same place where she will have stood. Intensely moving.
And a book launch at the Goethe Institut: Wildes Licht, a translation of NZ poetry into German, by Dieter Riemenschneider (2010). Bill Manhire read one of his Arctic poems (in English) with great emotion. A mystery.
The wonderful city library and the joys of being an autodidact, at least as far as this poetry is concerned. It is so much fun to find things out for oneself.
From the library: two old tired books about Gerard Manley Hopkins, one an analysis of a selection of his poetry, (Landscape and Inscape, Vision and Inspiration in Hopkins's poetrey, by P. Milward, SJ and R Schoder, SJ, 1975) and another a collection with an introduction (Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edition, revised and enlarged, W H Gardner and N H MacKenzie, eds, 1967). Am learning The Windhover by heart. It is not in my main poetry book (Poetry of the English-Speaking World, R Aldington, ed., 1950), though others which I loved are - among them Pied Beauty, and In the Valley of the Elwy.
Today is Shabbat and on Shabbat I do not read about the Holocaust or other horrifying stories, nor do I work on the computer (It is now after dark, so officially no longer Shabbat).
Today for once there was absolutely nothing else to do. Always interesting to see what happens when nothing is planned. So: a nice long meditation, and a quiet morning lying on the sun-warmed patch on the floor, with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Peter was in his office, so I could read the poems out loud.
I was very happy.
I realise that the rest of the educated English-speaking world will know this poem. The more I read about Hopkins, the more interested I became. A Jesuit. A mystic. A great need for peace. An equally great love for nature. One of the commentaries said he had influenced the next generation's use of English.
Then a vigorous walk up Mt Kaukau with P and friends. I am fortunate.
Part II
I have not managed to keep up my blog writing, so a quick tour of recent reading:
A not good enough book by Amin Maalouf, entitled Baltasar's Odyssey, which is a voyage through parts of the Ottoman Empire and Europe in 1666, when many people believed that the end of the world was nigh. I don't know why he wrote it, except that it was published shortly after 2000, when people also worried about what would happen if all the computers stopped working.
I had the recurring feeling that he himself travelled along the same route and wrote in all the little details he noticed about people's behaviour in the 20th centurey into his book, adapting the material things around them to the 15th century. One of the reviews says "Sparkling and erudite". It did nothing for me.
Now quite different and a stunner: Peter Hobbs' The Short Day Dying (2005) - what a tour de force, and his first book too. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Best First Novel - I wonder who won that year, this book would have been hard to beat.
A well-meaning relatively uneducated man is struggling with his faith and his life. He writes in the style of the Bible, for that is all that he knows. Meaning, he never reads anything else. His syntax is Biblical and this is done with great skill. I found it wonderful. The character of this man is completely believable and his story is compelling.
Pushing Time Away: My grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna by Peter Singer (2003). This is the Peter Singer, the ethics specialist, writing about his family. I read it as part of research on Teresienstadt, which I promised a friend I would do for her. What a relief to read a book like this where someone remembers to put in the details that one wants to know, they did so and so, why did they choose to do that just then, and how did they go about it, that sort of stuff is often not covered well enough by people who experienced it. He has done thorough research, and I am grateful to him. Also: I recognise the feelings he describes - he went to the school where his grandfather taught and he says, I walked into the entrance hall, the same place my grandfather will have gone through many many times, it is unchanged...This is a recurring event through the book, an experience I had when I was in Nuremberg, My mother was here and here and here, I am standing on the same place where she will have stood. Intensely moving.
And a book launch at the Goethe Institut: Wildes Licht, a translation of NZ poetry into German, by Dieter Riemenschneider (2010). Bill Manhire read one of his Arctic poems (in English) with great emotion. A mystery.
Friday, 26 March 2010
Elevation
I finished a book and felt I was a different person for having read it.
It is Justin Cartwrights's To Heaven by Water (2009, Bloomsbury). The story of a man who has just lost his wife. The story begins and ends with wonderful poetry, it makes me feel like sailing, like floating, like coasting on the wind, the word that keeps coming to my mind is swooning, but of course it is the wrong physical implication, though it's the right sound, as if one could say or chant quietly Swooooooon, and run very lightly, hardly touching the ground, wrapped and half-carried (?) by a diaphanous veil... It is by Gerald Manley Hopkins, it is The Windhover. Is this one of those cases where everyone else knows it already?
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of
daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing...
The book is about love and death (like the title of Amos Oz's book). The word soul keeps appearing.
On a different topic, about reading and books today, one of the characters, a writer, says:
" ..those of us who love books, and I mean real books with long words, are a dwindling band. We're like the bushmen of the Kalahari desert [...], marginalised, even despised, as though we have a secret vice or carry a contagion.[...] a country without respect for its own literature is a country going to hell in a fucking handcart. We, the readers, are now like monks in the dark ages, keeping alive our culture. We are living in a new dark age, an age of mass ignorance; we are squeezed in the embrace of triviality and infantilism. I, for example, spend my days turning dumb ideas into dumber scripts that become even dumber mini-series. The BBC [...] has turned into a sink of touchy-feely mediocrity..."
I have been reading heaps of books, but not writing about them. Hopefully shall find more good ones.
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Cannibalising
7:30 am, and there is so much to do. I am struggling with my translation, having reached 41 pp, ie over 1/3 of the way. If I manage to keep on working at this pace, I might finish the first round in 3 months' time, ie in June. That would be great, though it will be a push.
Have read Guenther Grass's Peeling the onion at last. It is an important book. I want to re-read what Lynn wrote about it, her review. I know that I do not have the same level of excitement as she did. I am becoming single-minded: very interested in the telling details I might exploit for my own book. Cannibal. The same applies to the translation.
That's all for today because of wanting to catch up with the translating, one page a day, and already I am almost 3pp behind. Not to lose more ground today, I should translate at least a page.
Have read Guenther Grass's Peeling the onion at last. It is an important book. I want to re-read what Lynn wrote about it, her review. I know that I do not have the same level of excitement as she did. I am becoming single-minded: very interested in the telling details I might exploit for my own book. Cannibal. The same applies to the translation.
That's all for today because of wanting to catch up with the translating, one page a day, and already I am almost 3pp behind. Not to lose more ground today, I should translate at least a page.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Quickly, quickly
Read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press, 2008, bad translation from Swedish by Reg Keeland). Strictly air travel reading. The characters lack psychological credibility - particularly his male protagonist, funnily enough - the writing is not very good, and at the same time one wants to know what happens next, so can't put down. Sexually it is a male fantasy.
A waste of time. He is not another Henning Menkel, despite being Swedish.
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali (Transworld Publishers - Doubleday, 2009) reminded me a bit of Nadeem Aslam in the richness of language and the wealth of metaphor - is this the influence of being fluent in a language from a completely different language group? Again, hard to put down. Enjoyed the book, was interested in the world she created, particularly the kitchen and the hotel, and yet it is not a book I want to keep to read again. However, it does make me want to read Brick Road, which I suspect is the book where her heart lies.
A waste of time. He is not another Henning Menkel, despite being Swedish.
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali (Transworld Publishers - Doubleday, 2009) reminded me a bit of Nadeem Aslam in the richness of language and the wealth of metaphor - is this the influence of being fluent in a language from a completely different language group? Again, hard to put down. Enjoyed the book, was interested in the world she created, particularly the kitchen and the hotel, and yet it is not a book I want to keep to read again. However, it does make me want to read Brick Road, which I suspect is the book where her heart lies.
Monday, 8 February 2010
Tongue-tied
No writing for a long time, due to the very long 'festive' period - visitors and being away. Read two A S Byatt books from my shelves. I have little memory of ever having read them - only a vague familiarity...They were The Game (1967) and Babel Tower, (19..). Then spent time reading up about her and her sister on Wikipedia. It interests me to assess how much reality is used to create fiction. And I am nosy.
Both books are impressive.
That's all for today: I've not written for a long time and it has become hard. Ankylose, a French word to denote a kind of physical stiffness which is superimposed on a limb - includes the connotation that something was supple before, which the word stiff does not have. My little Larousse says either stiff or numb. Numb might be better, but is sensory only.
Enough of this.
Both books are impressive.
That's all for today: I've not written for a long time and it has become hard. Ankylose, a French word to denote a kind of physical stiffness which is superimposed on a limb - includes the connotation that something was supple before, which the word stiff does not have. My little Larousse says either stiff or numb. Numb might be better, but is sensory only.
Enough of this.
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