Reader's Digest Condensed Haiku

From the letters column of The Grauniad of 12 April 2008:
“Like many people nowadays, I rarely have time to sit down and read a whole haiku (Letters, March 22; Letters, March 29). This prompted my “Short Poem About Brevity” –
Haiku, why ramble so?”
 
Steven Handsaker
Barnstaple, Devon

Our life is but lent

“Our life is but lent; a good whereof to make, during the loan, our best commodity.  It is a debt due to a more certain owner than ourselves, and therefore so long as we have it, we receive a benefit; when we are deprived of it, we suffer no wrong. We are tenants at will of this clayey farm, not for any term of years; when we are warned out, we must be ready to remove, having no other title but the owner’s pleasure.  It is but an inn, not a home; we came but to bait, not to dwell; and the condition of our entrance was finally to depart. If this departure be grievous, it is also common; this today to me, tomorrow to thee; and the case equally affecting all, leaves none any cause to complain of injurious usage.”
Robert Southwell SJ: The Triumphs over Death.

Home, James!

“Nothing that is mere wordplay is ever witty,” says Clive James in today’s Grauniad. This statement is so profoundly wrong, one has to wonder if it is meant to be satire. To see how wrong it is, start by reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where mere wordplay produces some of the most clever wit in English. Finish by reading or watching pretty much any play by Tom Stoppard, or any episode of Seinfeld. What was James thinking?
Continue reading ‘Home, James!’

Gift of God

In his personal memoir, Dance of a Fallen Monk, George Fowler describes a person he met when Fowler was a late teenager who had an enormous influence on his personal development and his life. This person, whom Fowler calls Adeodatus Nikos, is a young man, not much older than Fowler, who was immensely well-read, particularly in matters spiritual and religious. Nikos is an engineer assigned to work for several months in Conrad, the boondocks town in Montana where Fowler is at high school, and they quickly become fast friends. Fowler is devastated when his friend is killed in a car accident soon after leaving the town.

Interested to know more, I searched on Nikos’ name but found nada. I soon realised his name may be a pseudonym, particularly as Adeodatus could be translated as “Gift of God”. Fowler says the death happened in June 1946. There were 683 recorded deaths in Montana in 1946, of whom just 4 were of people born between 1918-1922 (inclusive). One possible candidate is Mr Pedro Santos, born in Texas on 16 January 1921, and aged 25 when he died on 25 June 1946, although he did not die in car accident and was not an engineer. May he rest in peace. The name “Pedro Santos”, of course, would translate as “Saint Peter”. Fowler says that Nikos had two older twin brothers, both of whom were already married when Fowler met Nikos.

Meanwhile, I recalled that John Milton’s close teenage friend was named Charles Diodati (c.1608-1638), which surname also translates as “Gift of God”. Diodati also died young, when Milton was traveling abroad. Upon learning of his friend’s death from Diodati’s uncle in Geneva, Milton wrote a lament, Epitaphium Damonis, published in 1645. I wonder if Fowler knew about Diodati when he came to write about his own friend.

This page previously displayed an image showing Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, built originally for a relative of Charles Diodati. Byron and friends rented this house in the summer of 1816.

Why read?

Why do we read? Many people seem to assume that the only reason for reading is to obtain information about the world. With this view, reading fiction is perhaps hard to justify. But if one only reads to learn new facts, then one’s life is impoverished and Gradgrindian. Indeed, this reason strikes me as like learning to play the trumpet in order to have a means to practice circular breathing.
In fact, we read for many other reasons than just this one. One could say we primarily read novels for the pleasure that reading them provides:

  • the pleasure of reading poetic text (as in the novels of Hardy, Joyce or Faulkner, for instance)
  • the pleasure of reading elegant, finely-crafted prose (eg, Fanny Burney, Doris Lessing, Perec, Brautigan, the English translations of the books by Zhores and Roy Medvedev)
  • the pleasure of engaging in deductive reasoning (any detective or espionage novel)
  • the pleasure of imagining alternative societal futures (scifi), presents (political thrillers, espionage novels), or pasts (historical fiction)
  • the pleasure of being scared (crime thrillers, horror stories)
  • or the pleasure of parsing an intricate narrative structure (eg, Calvino, Fowles, Murnane, Pynchon).

These various pleasures are very distinct, and are orthogonal to the desire to gain information about the world. And some of these pleasures may also be gained from reading non-fiction, for example the finely-honed journalism of Lafcadio Hearn or AJ Liebling or Christopher Hitchens, or the writing of Oliver Sacks, who passed on today.

Transitions 2014

People who have passed on during 2014 whose life or works have influenced me:

  • Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1934- 2014), American poet
  • Charles Barsotti (1933-2014), American cartoonist
  • Sid Caesar (1922-2014), American comedian
  • Bob Crewe (1930-2014), American songwriter
  • Al Feldstein (1925-2014), American artist and editor of Mad magazine
  • Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), South African writer
  • Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014), French mathematician
  • Stuart Hall (1932- 2014), British cultural theorist
  • Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014), American actor
  • Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923-2014), Polish soldier and politician
  • Morris Lurie (1938-2014), Australian comic writer
  • Rik Mayall (1955-2014), British actor and comedian
  • Tony Meale (c. 1963-2014), Australian wit
  • Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) (1935-2014), Belgian-Australian political analyst
  • Maximilian Schell (1930-2014), German actor
  • Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014), Australian composer
  • Pete Seeger (1919-2014), American folk singer
  • Eduard Shevardnadze (1928-2014), Georgian politician
  • Horace Silver (1928-2014), American jazz pianist
  • Edward Gough Whitlam (1916-2014), Australian statesman
  • Robin Williams (1951-2014), American comedian and actor
  • Neville Wran (1926-2014), Australian politician.

Last year’s post is here.

Visual pleasure

StBridgetWavertreeLiverpool
Some buildings and spaces provide pleasure to the eye and heart, and an inexplicable lift to the spirits.   One such place is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Chicago, whose intimacy and proportions are ineffably balanced.  Another is the Italianate Church of St Brigid in Wavertree, Liverpool.  This Anglican church was designed by E. A. (Arthur) Heffer and built between 1868 and 1872.    The building can be clearly seen from the inter-city trains approaching and departing Liverpool’s Lime Street station, and seeing it never fails to lift my spirits.
Perhaps the pleasure arises from the stark contrast between the tall bell tower and the flat, surrounding landscape of  two-story Victorian terraces.  Or perhaps it is the shape and size of the tower; certainly, the visual pleasure would be much less if the tower were pyramid-shaped, or conical, or any shorter.

Poem: Epitaph

This poem was written by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, upon the death in 1983 of Vadim Delone, her fellow democracy protestor from August 1968.

Epitaph
(On the death of Vadim Delaunay)
Closer than a brother, the first and youngest
of us seven, whence no return.
Sweeter than sweet life, whereas there were seven,
hacking, digging the frozen earth?
To fall asleep that way, and to wake, detached from the earth,
beyond exile, KPP, barbed-wire . . .
beyond the thorny stars.  Pray for us,
offer your fraternal help.

 
Reference:
Natalya Gorbanevskaya [1983/2011]:  Selected Poems. Translated by Daniel Weissbort.  Manchester, UK: Carcanet.
KPP  (Kontrol’no-propusknoi punkt) is Frontier Control Point.