2011 Readings

Since it is that time of year when we make lists, here is my list of readings for 2011. It is full of old favorites, new voices, and fascinating discoveries just waiting to be made in each and every book. (I will try to provide links later.)

1. Kusamakura–Soseki Natsume

2. The Heredity of Taste–Soseki Natsume

3. The 210^th Day–Soseki Natsume

4. Kokoro–Soseki Natsume

5. To The Spring Equinox and Beyond–Soseki Natsume

6. My Individualism–Soseki Natsume

7. The Anatomy of Melancholy–Robert Burton

8. Coriolanus

9. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era–Donald Keene

10. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches–Matsuo Basho

11. 4 Plays: Amphitryon, Menaechmi, The Pot of Gold, The Haunted House–Plautus

12. Mother Clapp’s Molly House–Mark Ravenhill

13. Techne’s Clearinghouse–John Foy

14. Seven Studies For A Self Portrait–Jee Leong Koh

15. 4 Plays–Ben Jonson

16. Collected Satires of Juvenal

17. Satires of Horace and Persius

18. Turn–Wendy Chin-Tanner

19. Road Work Ahead–Raymond Luczak

20. My Life As Adam–Bryan Borland

21. Burnings–Ocean Vuong

22. The Satyricon and Apocolocyntosis–Petronius and Seneca

23. Collected Poems of James Merrill

24. The Gift–Vladimir Nabokov

25. Strong Opinions–Vladimir Nabokov

26. Pale Fire–Vladimir Nabokov

27. The Common Reader, First Series–Virginia Woolf

28. Nothing Like The Sun–Anthony Burgess

29. The Young Michelangelo: A Biography–John Spike

30. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter–Richard A. Feynman

31. Paradise Lost–John Milton

32. The Birds and Other Plays–Aristophanes

33. Selected Poems–James Fenton

34. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1–Ben Bova, editor

35. Pompeii–Robert Harris

36. The Difference Engine–William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

37. Collected Short Stories–Rudyard Kipling

38. Selected Short Stories–H.G. Wells

39. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form–Helen Vendler

40. Collected Short Stories–Ambrose Bierce

41. Selected Essays of Montaigne

42. Areopagitica–John Milton

43. Broca’s Brain–Carl Sagan

44. The Dyer’s Hand–W.H. Auden

45. Satori Blues–Cyril Wong

Sōseki’s Oranges

Beyond a grove of mandarins
depicted in this book I am
finishing, a flickering
candle flame unleashes a crazy
crowd of shadows. Demons dance
across the wall, TV, my toes—

everywhere except this page
I mark for you—130.
Maybe those monsters are enraged
nothing of importance lies
beyond Sōseki’s oranges

tonight. A hurricane.

Downed power lines. The grave.

Strange Meeting

For Gavin

Would we have over-looked each other
in passing—pissing at a gym urinal,
or shopping for some carrots at the store?

What a stupid question. Here we are.
My dick is thicker, thanks to you. Just like
when I stood in Waterstone’s, pulled your book

off the shelf, ignoring all the others. Did
your orange cover catch my eye? Your spine?
Did something you say seize my scrotum, “You

had better take me home if you want these
back, boy.” I’ve no idea. I just paid
my money, took you home. A whim. That choice

has altered all of my tomorrows now.
Graying—about the age I am today—
I looked at your portrait twelve years ago—

new to me as an exotic newt. Cute.
I studied your expression and compared
dust jacket photo to the words inside—

looking for insight. Here’s what I learned:
your bartender is Trebor, you like Poles,
you shoot wild cats. You wrote an epitaph

that rhymes, just like John Gay. Yes, we might have
never met. We might have died a thousand ways
today. But here we are. Imagine that.

A Pocket Full of Rye

Today's contribution to "Takaaki."

Two new stanzas.

I seem to be on a roll.

[Back to work.]


Part IV


The crude compartment I created when
I focused on the concrete, glass and steel
Elements of Takaaki place, I meant
Merely as a skeleton. I feel
We ought to decorate: add tatami mats
Surrounded by delicate shoji—that’s
The wooden screen (with paper windows) which
Separates our rooms; we’ll open rich
Closets, where futons are found folded, while
Not needed for sleeping, or some other use.
Before you enter, though, remove your shoes.
Shoes ruin the tatami. On the tile,
Out front, a pair of Muji slippers rest
Quietly for comfort of the guest.

The kitchen lies left of his bolted door.
It’s small, but servicable, black and bright;
It’s the best room in the apartment for
Stage managing a brief, premptive strike,
Or eating egg salad at night—egg
And bread crumbs are more visible. Pegged
To a corkboard above the phone, two keys
Will jingle if you pin a note. These
Keys may unlock a mailbox, or padlock,
A fair or frightening future. All I know
Is that I have an aunt Pandora, so
I don’t touch them. Taka-chan will talk
And turn them round, when he is on the phone.
But he’s entitled to. It is his home.

I do not pry or criticize. I lack
Those scholarly insticts, you might say.
I study coffee tables. Here’s a snack:
A bowl of crackers on a bamboo tray
Beside The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Does Azkaban share crackers with the man
Gyrating on the cover of HX
Or dangle them in front of him for sex?
It’s not clear. Maybe Agatha Christie—
This book—a Japanese translation of
The Body in the Library—would prove
Helpful in solving this—our mystery.
If only I could read it. But I can’t.
These Japanese are hard to understand.

Takaaki must provide the weirdest clues:
A leather sofa, color of burnt butter,
A TV tuned to Will & Grace, not news,
Chilly cha, a coaster, and another
Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye.
These are the blackbirds baked into the pye
We set before the reader. You are king.
Don’t let these details fly away, but sing,
Caw, croak, somehow illuminate
The mystery of love in ways that men
With tight abdominals, tight asses, ten
Inches don’t: let that sideways figure eight
I kiss, his double vaccination mark,
Slowly begin glowing in the dark.

August 11, 2009 Aetat. 40

Readers of this blog will encounter ghoulish, grinning gaps: gaps in writing, gaps in knowledge, gaps in artistry, gaps in grammer [sic], gaps in Time. At wheniwasoneandtwenty.blogspot.com, the care and well-being--dare I say enjoyment?--of the Reader remains our top priority today just as it has been since Day 1 [A.U.C.]. Despite the gaps.


The trouble is, I get distracted. I wander off into ravines. Into reveries. Sometimes I secretly go fishing for ideas in calm, cool underground lagoons. I will roll up my khakis, dip my feet in the crystalline water, wiggling my toes, listening to the low hiss of my Coleman lantern. This is what I do for inspiriation, not for fish. For fish, I go to the Grand Central Market, where they have discount salmon on Wednesday. Yea, though the brain of a poet is a convoluted place, we are not all madmen. Or admen. By and large, I think, we are simply sadmen, obsessed with arranging ripples.

You know, he says, surveying his icy, air-conditioned cavern, Plato was wrong about the shadows cast upon cave walls: the luminous ideas behind the shadows we see are not idealized forms, but simply stand-ins for other things, bright things Plato had trouble defining in proper, philosophical Greek. Fortunately, we are working in English and we enjoy a much larger, more scientific vocabulary than Plato. We call these glowy things: torches. Candles. Lanterns. Flashlights. Halogen lamps. Photon emitters. Stars. In a fit of poetic whimsy, we might label them Makers of Light. We distinguish these sources of light from words because words belong to a different class of objects. Words are ripples of thought written in the air. And one does not lightly assume responsiblity for the air--for an entire language--especially one as universally susceptible to misunderstanding as plain English. So, let me be pefectly clear here, unlike a politician.

If I were writing in Mandarin, say, no one would care what I said, outside of China, and perhaps a few concerned college professors. And even then, if anyone did notice me, or one of my poems, or blogposts, my slip-ups, elisions, or allusions, you would probably never hear about it. Our journalists certainly wouldn't report it. Most were educated in the arts of ignorance and deception by those same concerned college professors I noted above. I would simply be whisked away silently, at midnight, like one of those poor people from Falun Gong, thinkers of unsanctioned thoughts. I would wind up in some Hell of a State Hospital having my liver rudely extracted by a bureaucrat for the benefit of some dipsomaniacal lighting designer shopping for organs on eBay in Cologne.

But everybody cares about what you say in English these days, so one must be extra careful not to hurt anybody's feelings. I know of people who have built impressive careers on nothing more than feelings, mouthing carefully constructed--largely meaningless, but infinitely malleable--phrases. And nothing else. Thus, the Obama phenomenon.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

Perhaps this is why I have been quietly re-reading James Boswell's book The Life of Johnson. Samuel Johnson was a subversive in the truest sense: a man of reason, an Englishman, not a politician. He was most famous as a lexicographer, but he was also a poet of great skill. He defined the limits of words in both careers. He even tinkered a bit in philosophy. He famously kicked a stone to refute the idea that everything in the universe is merely a mental construction:

"After we came out of the church, we [Johnson and Boswell] stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus.""

Dr. Johnson defended his definitions. He was a scholar. He was also pompous, yes, as many scholars are. He was untidy, certainly. And besides his aggressive intelligence, he also had a corpulent wife who was twice his age. The widow of a mercer. And he loved her very deeply. In his defense, I think this must count for something.

One of his best friends was a shady versificator named Savage. Together the young Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage would wander the backstreets of London. I suppose, if London had cool caves instead of cathouses to investigate, they might have visited a few of those, too. Just to see if the fish were jumping. And how high. Sort of like I do on some summer nights...

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Johnson's Life.

"In estimating the progress of his mind during these two years, as well as in future periods of his life, we must not regard his own hasty confession of idleness; for we see, when he explains himself, that he was acquiring various stores; and, indeed he himself concluded the account, with saying, "I would not have you think I was doing nothing then." He might, perhaps, have studied more assiduously; but it may be doubted, whether such a mind as his was not more enriched by roaming at large in the fields of literature, than if it had been confined to any single spot. The analogy between body and mind is very general, and the parallel will hold as to their food, as well as any other particular. The flesh of animals who feed excursively, is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts, and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?"