Designed by Danish furniture maker, Finn Juhl. That is all for today.
I do not join in the universal adulation that Merwin receives, not because I don’t enjoy him, but because I feel that he published two amazing, near perfect collections and everything that has followed merely repeats those successes to diminishing returns.
However, one of those two books is the recently reprinted (in honor of its fiftieth anniversary) The Lice (the other is Carrier of Ladders).
Both tackle his most prominent themes: environmental destruction (which becomes tied up with our own mortality) and opposition to war.
There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said about this book. Now that it’s no longer nearly impossible to find, please look for it.
And don’t let me put you off the rest of his poetic career. He’s never done anything bad. I just don’t feel he’s done anything new since The Lice and Carrier of Ladders.
And I included an image of The Asians Dying because, while it’s unusually direct, is also perfectly devastating.
A battle of wills and stratagems betwixt Ru, the cunning and enslaving fungal sentience from Mars and Zaro, the last man not conditioned to avoid violence and war. And a secret tribe of Anarctican survivialists. And three or four deus ex machinas.
But you know what? It’s a brisk, snappily paced read, pleasantly and constantly propelled forward.
Also, these awesome ads at the end.
I also get Foreign Affairs and the weekend Washington Post.
Leaving the WaPo aside for the moment, I often don’t feel sure what to do with my other periodicals after I’ve read them. They all have wonderful staying power. Who would object to going back and reading some of the great articles published in the New York Review of Books down the road? But, conversely, who does want to risk being that person whose home is stacked with piles of moldering newspapers, becoming the subject of a sad human interest story after the fire department has to bust down the door once your sad, lonely, and malodorous corpse becomes decayed enough to alert the neighbors?
I have kept the Poetry issues because they are small and fit easily on bookshelves. Sadly, I have decided that Brooklyn Rail, for example, is more likely to become a testament to my own cluttered nature than a source of continued enlightenment through the years. So I toss them in the recycling.
I’m one of many people who started mourning too early. But even after it became clear that the reports were premature, it felt like a bad episode of a medical drama. People around me crying, Wait, wait! He’s not dead! We can save him. And me thinking, he’s gone, but you just can’t see it yet. On a practical level, it was because, it wasn’t a hoax that he had been found unconscious following cardiac arrest. That’s not something you come back from. As Christopher Hitchens said after being asked about his prospects after being diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer, there’s not a stage 5. Miracles happen, but the world doesn’t feel very miraculous right now. We have inched closed to nuclear because of the rage tweets of a thin-skinned man child; another angry white man with a guy massacred dozens of people and we won’t do anything about gun control; and more, but I’m just not up to it, right now.
Tom Petty’s death affected me more than the horror in Las Vegas. It’s attributed to Stalin, but who knows if he ever said: one death is a tragedy, but a millions deaths are a statistic. And mass shootings feel like a statistic now. It’s just one of the costs of living of America, like toxic drinking water and institutional racism. We are just supposed to be grateful, right?
I digress.
I felt like I knew Tom Petty. He was from Florida. He was the greatest songwriter of the last thirty-five or forty years. Every song on Damn the Torpedoes is amazing. No isn’t reassured by Don’t Back Down. Which is probably the song we need right now.
But I feel like backing down. I’ve been feeling that way for a while.
My child will never know Tom Petty. I try to make my child appreciate American Girl, but I’m not sure it will work. My child will be an American Girl, but also not. But mostly, my child will be from a place where Tom Petty, in a sense, does not exist. Which is a reminder of my own mortality. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities wrote about the moment where the number of dead, a person know, outnumbers the living. I’m not close to that yet. Not by decades. But I can see the balance shifting. Tom Petty has shifted to the other balance.
I might not have read this book at all, had I not finished all the books I brought with me for a day outside and had the nearest library not had this sequel to a novel I read maybe a year or two ago. Read more
Lately, in honor of the 80th anniversary of The Hobbit, there have been some defenses of Tolkien’s works as more morally nuanced than they are given credit for.
It is this truth which makes The Children of Hurin so difficult to read. The book is mostly about Hurin’s son, Turin. A great warrior and a charismatic figure, he inspires great love from most of those he meets. As the reader, I kept waiting for his revelation. For him to grow up and stop being petulant, impetuous, pointlessly wrathful. It never happened.
A few other characters realized that, beneath his good intentions and ability to kill evil monsters, he was kind of a jerk.
And everything, felt in vain, in the end.
Stylistically, it is more like the Silmarillion than the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit. It’s affect is less naturalistic and more in the style of northern European sagas (think Beowulf or Njal’s Saga).
This has been on my ‘to read’ list since it was translated in English a couple of years ago. It got great reviews and was deemed interesting, beyond its qualities as literature, for insight into a lesser known aspect of contemporary Chinese culture, which is to say, its science fiction.
The Three Body Problem is ‘hard’ science fiction, more or less. My friend Ryan gave a succinct definition of hard science fiction as being sci fi that depends on one thing being true that is not currently true. That could be a change to the laws of physics or it could be something like a technology not currently available. But the idea is to keep everything more or less the same, except for that one thing, but incorporating the projected, cascading effects of the change.
In this case, it is that contact was made with alien civilization living in the three star solar system of Alpha Centauri (the book’s title comes from the difficulty of determining orbital patterns when there is the gravitational effect of three stars on an object; the question, I gather, is whether it is possible to determine or whether the complex factors involved make it impossible and also whether it is a repeating pattern or not).
Something I see in Chinese movies, too (I watch a lot of Chinese actions movies – from the heyday or the Shaw Brothers to the latest one on Netflix), where the current government is not only not criticized, but more or less praised. There may be local corruption, but the theory is sound, as it were. That said, it was pretty darn critical of the Cultural Revolution.
It also implied that environmentalism is an alien plot to stop science. That felt a little weird, not in the least because China is now taking climate change and environmental degradation seriously.
Over all, it’s a surprisingly tense book, especially since we don’t really encounter the aliens (yet), but instead it’s a journey through scientific concepts and Umberto Eco-level conspiracies.
That was a question asked by an episode of Seinfeld. I love Seinfeld. My better half ranges between ambivalence and mild dislike. But that’s neither here nor there.
And I’m talking about my phone, not alcohol. Read more
This week is the eightieth anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit and so I’ll add my two cents to the celebrations.
I can still recite the opening several sentences of the novel from memory (‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.’). Read more
the coffee philosopher 