His travelogues are sprinkled with many poems, though I wouldn’t call this a poetry collection, but I wish some more were actually by Bashō and fewer by his students (especially one named Sora, who often accompanied him) and others.
He doesn’t engage in the kind of detailed, rapt description that I’ve found in nineteenth century European works, but it’s still moving to read his spare remarks about mountains, rivers, and beaches; meeting fellow poets; and making pilgrimages to isolated temples.
I would support keeping Confederate statues up, if it truly is for educational purposes, but then we need to make sure that the we post detailed educational descriptors in front of each and every depiction of Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson, and others.
For example:
The Scottsdale, Arizona library has a justly famous sculpture outside. My mother’s most vivid memories of me in Arizona are of me climbing on the pieces that make it up (it was allowed, I gather; and by the way, I am not talking about the ‘LOVE’ sculpture because that wasn’t there during my early childhood days in the southwest).
My most prominent memory of that library is actually of what felt like a terrible failure.
Having finished Hitchens’ brief biography of Jefferson, the final question must be: is this anything more than an adequate biography of our third president?
And I am not sure that it is.
Let is first be said that I understood almost nothing, not because it was so complex (though some of the mystical-mathematical Pythagoreanism might have been), but because my eyes constantly glazed over.
Happy 330th birthday to Samuel Richardson!
It is a book that both is and is not to be read in terms of its literary value and impossible to disentangle this book from modern history. While I enjoyed it, it was also difficult for me to fully appreciate because I never fully reconciled the conflicted nature of the collection.
Towards the end, there is some sign that the titular Genji feels some real remorse for the emotional carnage he has left in his wake. But not much. Or, at least, not enough to my mind. But the author clearly seems to be showing some disapproval. Read more
Matthew Arnold is a poet and essayist who I never quite took to, darkling plain or no; and Silver Spring is a small suburban city north of DC which once again has a bookstore, the clarifyingly and concisely named, Silver Spring Books.
the coffee philosopher 