At Rhino.
Teaser quote: I turn the pages of this book in a state of outrage that anyone could have been gifted with this much talent. I keep saying aloud: “Son of a bitch!” “Goddammit!” “Fucking no. NO. You can’t be this good. No one can be this good!”
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Works and Days is a little bit like a poem that might have been written in an 18th-century madhouse. There’s little personal bits, loads of advice (some of it patently cuckoo), and then miles of simply joyous description of natural phenomena, in the gnomic mode.
Teaser quote: I felt I must warn the young as I had been warned: “Lessons are bad. Talking animals are bad. Anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is bad.” Today I think the opposite, straight down the line. Lessons are good; talking animals, hell yes. And anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is probably my only reason for getting up in the morning.
Teaser quote: The ants all gathered ’round and said, Ah-hah, you are justly served for being such a lazybones! Now starve, shithead.
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.
(photo from Miłosz's h.s. yearbook)
Teaser quote: Yer daddy is yer daddy.
Teaser quote: “I been reading eight hours? Seems like I been sitting here maybe ninety minutes….”
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: This is probably the most pleasurable and re-readable book of poems that’s gonna come out, this decade.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
Teaser quote: Marianne Moore is to prosody what the Marquis de Sade was to holding hands and sharing a milkshake.
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.
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.
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]
