Humplife

Not much fiction this quarter. That seems to be an ongoing theme. My hope is to read more fiction this year. We’ll see how that ends up.

Art

Book of the Sword: An Artists Devotion – A beautiful book tracing the history of the sword and the warriors who used them. Not primarily a history book, just an artist’s love letter to a weapon.

Religion

Shinto Meditations For Revering the Earth by Stuart D.B. Pickens.  A series of rituals for different seasons, inspired by Shinto rather than being adaptations of Shinto rituals. I didn’t find the language, the poetry that should be the language of ritual, to be compelling.

Deep Ancestors: Practicing the Religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans by Ceswir Serith.  Trying to use the same techniques of comparative language that scholars have used to reconstruct a proto indo European language, the author tries to reconstruct a proto indo European religion. As with any project of that nature there are gaps, dark places in which we will never shine a light, but I found the book compelling. I have gone back to it over and over. His ritual language is much better than the Shinto Meditations book.

Scholar Warrior: An Introduction to the Tao in Everyday Life by Deng Ming-Dao.  A book I read years ago and returned to.  It’s easy to pick apart the large swaths of this book rooted in traditional Chinese medicine. I still have problems, as a secular westerner, with Chi. But if you look at the broad outlines of Taoist living laid out, eat right, stay fit, keep your mind engaged, it’s down to earth and spot on.  And who is to say our approach to those things in inherently better than the traditional Chinese approach?

Food of the Gods, The Search for the original tree of knowledge, a radical history of plants, drugs and human evolution by Terrence McKenna.  Under religion, because I don’t know where else to put it and it fits her as well  as anywhere else. His theory is that psychoactive plants contributed heavily to the evolutionary stresses which created the modern human. 

A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine by John K. Nelson.  A look behind the ritual cycle of one Japanese temple, the priests who oversee, the worshippers who take part and the community they live in. If you’re studying Shinto, this is an important book to read. It gets past theorizing to the practice. Loved the bits of the older priests teaching the kids the trick to being able to kneel through a long ritual and still get up without falling over because your legs have gone to sleep.

Poetry

In Blue Mountain Dusk, poems by Tim McNulty, great poetry from a local author.

Rainbows Appear, Tibetan Poems of Shabkar (1781-1858)

Sleepless Nights, Verses for the Wakeful by Shih Wen-hsiang translated by Thomas Cleary. Very good translations. As good as David Hinton. I wish TC had done more poetry.

Selected Poems of Tu Fu translated by David Hinton. Man, Tu Fu lived a hard life.  Some of these are painful to read. He writes about being sick, about the death of his children. The stuff of great poetry, and not all as hard to read as those.

Science

Natural Act a Sidelong View of Science and Nature by David Quammen. A collection of articles from Outside Magazine and National Geographic.  Not a waste of time. Not raving.

The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals  died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson. A rather positive portrayal of humanity, which does not blame us for any of the extinctions at the end of Ice Age, but that we simply spread out into a new niche with a new set of behaviors. In places where those factors remained the same our way of life did also, everywhere else we continued to change under the pressure of changing circumstance.  The Neanderthals were robust ambush hunters who couldn’t survive in the open areas and were penned in by the cold and weren’t able to spring back. That they were probably no more or less ‘smart’ than us.

The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. I’m sure that Jung purists would consider this a hatchet job, and in the second half it questions his therapy and professionalism with several of his students and followers. It alleges that he was purposely trying to found a movement that could replace the mainstream Christian religion in people’s lives.  Further, that  neo-religious sentiment came from the same well spring that in part fed the volkish movement of Nazi Germany. It levels some bit of anti-Semitism against Jung, but very minor for the day, and he turned quickly against the Nazi strain of anti-semitism when it became obvious. I think it did a very good job showing his personal quest for spirituality, for understanding of himself, which he tried, as a flawed human being to pass on to others.  

Fiction

The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason. A collection of vignettes and short stories that form no coherent narrative, but are a jazz riff on the Illiad and the Odyssey. I devoured this book. I consider it the equal of ‘The Dictionary of the Khazars’. A good grounding in those two pillars of western literature are invaluable, but I loved this book.

Lots of Reading from

The Good Book by A.C. Grayling

The Living I Ching by Deng Ming Dao

The Original I Ching by Margaret J. Pearson

Misty twilight forest

Caught ‘twixt day and dark

black and white world

filled with the sound

of falling rain

A light reading period, lots of work, Borders going under. Some of these have been posted before on their own. 

Graphic Novels

First Wave by Brian Azzerello – A DC universe reboot, set in an alternate present with some classic characters like Batman, but also The Spirit and Doc Savage. This is a universe with no superpowers. It’s really an update of the old pulps, epitomized by the Doc Savage series. This is a graphic novel trying to do what I am trying to do in novel form and doing it very, very well. Azzarello’s writing is great, his opening monologue from the Batman’s POV is spot on and sets the tone for the whole book. Here is my ultimate compliment: I bought this in hardcover.

Poetry

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - Great advice for writers of all sorts, and if we all considered ourselves poets, would that be a bad thing?

Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell.  Dense, almost unreadable. He’s trying to grapple with mystical, huge concepts, but it comes out as gibberish, which is a common pitfall of writing about mystical experience. I find myself drawn to the small, concrete detail as opposed to the soaring and amorphous.

Nine Horses by Billy Collins – Another poetry collection. One of the few contemporary poets I find myself liking. 

Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins – Another one by Billy Collins. I find myself liking his later work more than his earlier. Does that mean older guys do good work, hurray, or that I will never master my craft to that extent because I have already run out of time, boo.

Before Ten Thousand Peaks: Chinese Poetry translated by Paul Hansen. A collection of many different poets from a wide range of historical eras, from the almost mythical to the near contemporary.  Not as compelling as other collections of Chinese poetry I have read recently, I wouldn’t seek this one out.

Mountain Home: Chinese Wilderness Poetry translated by David Hinton

This collection spans years and poets.  What David does as well as translate the poetry is put the poets into context.  The context is threefold. He tells you when they lived and enough of Chinese history to place them. He tells you a little bit about them as individuals, who they were and their life circumstances. Most importantly he explains the philosophy behind the poetry. River and Mountain poetry is deeply seeped in Taoist and Zen (Ch’an) thought and practice. Understanding the context lends the poetry a depth that can only be vaguely intuited without it.

What I find refreshing in comparison to contemporary self help, or works of fiction with a message, is these poets aren’t trying to convince me of anything. They aren’t  trying to teach me anything. They don’t have a website with ads. They don’t have a series of inspirational tapes or a special on PBS. No one is selling me anything. They are trying to embody their philosophy and maybe learn something themselves by doing so. 

Fiction

The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett. A Noir thriller set in an alternate universe. Good Noir that veers sharply into science fiction at the end. I really enjoyed this one, and bought his other book.

Conan the Barbarian by Michael Stackpole, based on the movie. Really good job, too.

Science

Here on Earth by Tim Flannery. A Natural History of the world. Great stuff on the beginnings of the Earth and of life, of the spread of mankind and how we have changed the ecosystems we came into contact with. As with many authors I think he misreads prehistory and the rise of civilization and comes to some wrong conclusions. The end is a couple of chapters on how we’ve really screwed the planet over lately. He stays fairly upbeat, but I don’t know that I come away feeling as good about things as Tim.

The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution by David Rains Wallace. I picked this up while on vacation in Northern California. It chronicles the natural history of the Klamath Mts of N. California and Oregon. Very good information on the ancestral forests of North America and the mythology, the stories, we tell about evolution.

The Horse the Wheel and Language by David Anthony.  All about the origins and initial dissemination of the Indo European language and culture.

Kids Books, in audio

Tale of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo. Very well written fable, and wonderfully performed. I can’t believe they butchered the movie so badly. Of course I do believe it.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban. As with the physical books, this is about where she loses me in the series. This is the point where I realize I have had my fill of Harry Potter and push away from the table.

The Incredible Journey- A book I remembered fondly from my childhood and Cormac and I enjoyed but bored Kris to tears. The thing that really struck me was the college level vocabulary in a book for grade school readers.   

                             Blank Page

Sometimes life isn’t poetic.

 The pen hovers over paper but no words spill out

It’ an illusion

Everyday has its share of poetry

Some days I’m just not poet enough to catch it

I’m not still enough, quiet enough

To hear it

                                     Carnival Rain

Pattering rain on Maple Leaves hardly

Audible over carnival ride screams

From the fair downtown, distance distorted

 Into the keen of hungry ghosts angry

Vengeful but the rain builds from shower to

Downpour, patter to tin roof drum solo

Until carnival wailing drowns and sinks

Into Autumn night

                                 On a Vivid Fall Day

Painted bright with late afternoon colors

A family falls apart, errands are

Done and left undone, Grandmothers die

Beloved pets are lost, and life goes on

But not, of course, for everyone involved

On a crisp clear day in late September

                               A Late Walk in the Wildwood

Daylight fades to black, trees arch overhead

Become pillars of shadow and dream, owl

Home, haunted by bats a, cathedral now

Covering a multitude of sins

Leaving us blind to the flaws of the world

                                  A Moment of Clarity While Walking

In a darkling summer wood

Woodpecker laughs unseen

A maple seed spins lazily to the ground

                                                  Lost

I wrote a poem at work, while on break

Yellow legal pad and clipboard

I wrote about bankruptcy, liquidation, loss and mourning

Now I can’t find it anywhere but I’m sure it was brilliant

                                       Jacket Morning

First to turn green in the Spring. Elderberry and crabapple are going yellow

The Devil’s Club is closing its doors for the season

Maples are green and full, but there is an orange crunch underfoot

Hands in pockets, school buses full, jacket morning

9/16/11

 I have started writing a poem a day, here are the first three.                                

                      On the Last Sunday of Borders

We start late, dark already in lingering summer heat

Thoughts chaotic, scattering into the shadowed forest

While the full moon plays peek-a-boo in the branches

9/11/11

                                  Up at 4 am to Walk the Dog

Silent footsteps on blacktop, loud on gravel

I find it’s hard to pick blackberries in the dark

I chat with a mirage of Stephen King as we walk, then

Time for coffee

Hey, it’s 4 am, what do you want from me?

9/12/11

                               Sick, Generic Dayquil Running Out

I am a poor monk, indifferent mystic, sometime poet

My dreams are small yet remain out of reach

Perhaps I dream of the wrong things

Though just now more cold medicine sounds really good

9/13/11

This collection spans years and poets.  What David does as well as translate the poetry is put the poets into context.  The context is threefold. He tells you when they lived and enough of Chinese history to place them. He tells you a little bit about them as individuals, who they were and their life circumstances. Most importantly he explains the philosophy behind the poetry. River and Mountain poetry is deeply seeped in Taoist and Zen (Ch’an) thought and practice. Understanding the context lends the poetry a depth that can only be vaguely intuited without it.

What I find refreshing in comparison to contemporary self help, or works of fiction with a message, is these poets aren’t trying to convince me of anything. They aren’t  trying to teach me anything. They don’t have a website with ads. They don’t have a series of inspirational tapes or a special on PBS. No one is selling me anything. They are trying to embody their philosophy and maybe learn something themselves by doing so.  

We got our first color TV in 1968. By today’s standards it was a smallish screen, but enclosed by a huge wooden superstructure. To my five year old self it looked huge. The show that came on first was Star Trek. Spock is in heat on Vulcan and fighting Kirk, the music is loud and the primary colors are blindingly vivid. 

I remember sitting mesmerized in front of that picture with absolutely no idea what was going on, and not caring one little bit. My Mom came by and stopped, looked at the violent, loud show I was parked three feet away from and said, “Do you really  want to watch this?”

To which I answered a breathless, “Yeah.”