Not exactly a beach book....

I am particularly strong on urging every single person to make a best effort every day to do what’s at the top of his or her TO DO list.

So when I found out that Dr. Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at Clare College, Cambridge, has published a translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics intended for a mass audience, my first thought was “Go for it, Toby!”

Now I’m having second thoughts. Roughly a couple million books are published every year. The books in my personal collection are stacked higher than my head along a wall in the basement. I haven’t read all of them yet. I think I’m going to pass on Writings from Ancient Egypt.

Here are a few excerpts, courtesy of TheGuardian.com

Letters written by a farmer called Heqanakht date from 1930BC but reflect modern concerns, from land management to grain quality. He writes to his steward: “Be extra dutiful in cultivating. Watch out that my barley-seed is guarded.”

Turning to domestic matters, he sends greetings to his son Sneferu, his “pride and joy, a thousand times, a million times”, and urges the steward to stop the housemaid bullying his wife: “You are the one who lets her do bad things to my wife … Enough of it!”

Other texts include the Tempest Stela. While official inscriptions generally portray an ideal view of society, this records a cataclysmic thunderstorm: “It was dark in the west and the sky was filled with storm clouds without [end and thunder] more than the noise of a crowd … The irrigated land had been deluged, the buildings cast down, the chapels destroyed … total destruction.”

from kingscrossexpress.wordpress.com

If you were thinking maybe it would be something like “Downton Abbey,” or maybe Fifty Shades of Grey, or maybe “The Simpsons” with cats and pyramids, think again….

...I digress

The words

Excesses of love

Let's put one more thing in context....

Chautauqua, revisited....

Book review: The Witches: Salem, 1692

Before comic books there were....

The other boondoggler....

Play time

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

"Many waters cannot quench love."

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894)

Scottish novelist, poet, all-purpose writer

Stevenson is famous for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

 He's not so famous for his last (uncompleted) novel, St Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1897). It was finished from Stevenson's notes by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, a talented British writer.

St. Ives is unmistakable 19th century prose, through and through—Stevenson's oeuvre is fastidiously lush, precise, sophisticated, with deeply contextual character development and dialogue that leaves me breathless with anticipation for more. Did I mention that I'm a fan of 19th century prose?

There is a love interest, of course. It involves a prim but worldly Scottish maiden and the eponymous French prisoner, a nobleman whose service to Napoleon has ended in captivity in Edinburgh. Stevenson allows le prisonnier, M. le Vicomte de St. Ives, to confidently speculate on his prospects with the lady: "Many waters cannot quench love."

Indeed. Read St. Ives to get the whole story.

First American novel by black author

The first "Mr. Vice-President"

Why doesn't every headline say "stupid"?

Some people have too much money....(part 21)

Gee willikers, six miles an hour!

Women who pioneered electronic music

"...the peregrines..."

Software upload

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“…centuried rust…”

I like this one, mostly.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a poet of the so-called "imagist" school (see below).  It seems that I incline to think in imagist terms……

Her poem below is not a masterpiece by any means. I particularly do not respond with gusto to reversal of subject-verb order (“…burns the twilight…”)

"March Evening" is a grand description of the dying down of day.

I love the weathercock’s “…centuried rust…”

I love “…wrapping the mists round her withering form, day sinks down…”

I love “…to-morrow travails to birth…”

I didn’t notice until I was reading the poem for the fourth time that she uses rhyme.

March Evening

Blue through the window burns the twilight;

  Heavy, through trees, blows the warm south wind.

Glistening, against the chill, gray sky light,

  Wet, black branches are barred and entwined.

Sodden and spongy, the scarce-green grass plot

  Dents into pools where a foot has been.

Puddles lie spilt in the road a mass, not

  Of water, but steel, with its cold, hard sheen.

Faint fades the fire on the hearth, its embers

  Scattering wide at a stronger gust.

Above, the old weathercock groans, but remembers

  Creaking, to turn, in its centuried rust.

Dying, forlorn, in dreary sorrow,

  Wrapping the mists round her withering form,

Day sinks down; and in darkness to-morrow

  Travails to birth in the womb of the storm.

“March Evening” was published in Lowell’s book A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912).

Imagism:

The imagist movement included English and American poets in the early 20th century who wrote free verse and were devoted to “clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.” As a strand of modernism, imagism was officially launched in 1912 when Ezra Pound read and marked up a poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed it “H. D. Imagiste," and sent it to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine.

The movement sprang from ideas developed by T. E. Hulme, who as early as 1908 was proposing to the Poets’ Club in London a mode of poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the imagist manifesto: “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.”

Them’s words to write poetry by.

  

"...surely it will"

"...soil that knows only yes..."

Another poet heard from....(part 10)

Kernel and husk

Another poet heard from....(part 8)

"...they tend to joy..."

"...surely it will"

Writing: I can tell you this....

Soul talking....

Homeward

Up for the count

Understanding

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Ars Poetica, the art of Horace

Thinkers and writers and philosophers have been talking about poetry for thousands of years—notwithstanding, we continue to puzzle and prate and pontificate about the nature of this, perhaps, most classical of the arts.

I’m doing much reading about poetry. I wish I could say that it’s an entirely pleasant learning experience.

Take a moment to reflect on this commentary by Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 B.C.):

“…the poet [should] just now say what ought just now to be said…In the choice of his words, too, the author of the projected poem must be delicate and cautious, he must embrace one and reject another: you will express yourself eminently well, if a dexterous combination should give an air of novelty to a well-known word…”

(From Ars Poetica, c. 15 B.C.)

Exactly so. In my poems, I strive to find the right words to profoundly express what’s in my mind and in my eye and in my ear. I want to offer my sensations most fully to the reader.

Here’s a sample:

Listen

Surf sounds, the singing of the sea,

the breaking rollers,

mellowed crunch of wave on wave,

the boistered drumroll of eternal tides.

There is no silent sea, we think….

….consider a sheltered beach,

in the lee of a baffling sand bar,

sea-spawned shoal,

mediator for sea and shore,

muffler of the surf,

tamper of the borning breakers,

damper of the singing of the sea,

guardian of truth about

the vastly silent blue water.

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Published in The Australia Times Poetry Magazine and in Whispers

Stones and bones

Phase transition

Kernel and husk

Dance  in the night

Book review: Statue in Search of a Pedestal

What it doesn't say....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might…”

Ecclesiastes 9:10
King James VersionV

This is an elegant reminder for me that I am committed to doing what I want to do, committed to doing the right thing, committed to taking my best swing with all my heart….

Ecclesiastes is regarded as one of the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament. Likely it was written in the 3^rd century AD by an unknown author, who used as a pseudonym the Hebrew word Koheleth, usually translated as “teacher” or “preacher,” with the Latin transliteration Ecclesiastes.

“Do it with thy might” asserts a powerful admonition, with moral suasion and with raptured optimism.

Them’s words to live by.

Is it properly chilled?

A slow eruption of despair

Educators: what do they know and how long have they known it?

Book review: The Climate Casino

"See the [segregated] USA, in your Chevrolet..."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

A slow eruption of despair

Review: The Iceman Cometh    
A play by Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

Written 1939, first performance 1946

Stamina is one thing you need to load up on so you can watch The Iceman Cometh.

Pathos, not so much. Your usual willingness to embrace pathos will be fully engaged, because Eugene O’Neill boiled this play in pathos.

The short version:

A bunch of broke-down drunks in a 1912 Greenwich Village bar sprawl in the chairs, mutually reinforcing their relentless pursuit of a maundering besotted state that creates the milieu for exercising their pipe dreams.

When their hero, the traveling salesman they call Hickey, tries to talk them into exorcizing their pipe dreams, they oh so tentatively agree….but they fail in oh so predictable ways.

In the final scene, Larry—forlorn, a lapsed anarchist—mutters “Life is too much for me, I’ll be a weak fool, looking with pity at the two sides of everything ‘til the day I die.”

That’s really The Iceman Cometh, in simplest language. It distinctly examines only one side of everything. The play makes no pretense about having redeeming qualities. It’s a slow eruption of despair. It’s a slow walk through the dark side. There is no exit except death’s door. I was glad, at the end, when I could stop watching it.

Early in his career, Marlon Brandon turned down an offer to play a key role in Iceman, saying that O’Neill’s work was “ineptly written and poorly constructed.”

I think The Iceman Cometh is a masterpiece of truth-telling. He tells some truths about life that are all too real for some people, and all too horrid contingencies for the rest.

I imagine that watching it is a lot less terrifying than living it.

Educators: what do they know and how long have they known it?

The year in pictures....

Another poet heard from....(part 8)

Book review: The Brothers

readin', writin', 'rithmetic....a little history

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

The art of Robert Louis Stevenson (part 2)

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894)

Scottish novelist, poet, all-purpose writer, composer

If you had a childhood and if you can read, likely you need no introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson or some of his justly famous books:

Treasure Island.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Master of Ballantrae.

Did you know he was a poet? A composer?

Stevenson at 7

Stevenson wrote nearly 250 poems, some of them as lighthearted as this excerpt from “My Shadow,” part of his “Child’s Garden of Verses” collection:

“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
 And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
 He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
 And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”

Stevenson played piano and flageolet (a variety of the fipple flute, some similarities to a recorder), and he wrote almost 125 original compositions for those instruments and for clarinet, violin, guitar and mandolin.

He was a writer for all seasons, and is widely popular among non-English-speaking readers. Around the world, only 25 writers have been translated more than Stevenson.

The art of Robert Louis Stevenson

The art of Jack Myers

The art of Mary Oliver (part 3)

In search of....music

"Shhhhh!"

The first "Indian" treaty

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The art of Jack Myers

Jack Elliott Myers (1941-2009) was a prolific writer who had been Poet Laureate of Texas in 2003.

I knew nothing of his work before I read “Fragment” recently on the A Year Of Being Here website.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Remember when you were little

  and…

  …you weren't afraid of anything in life

  because there wasn't any difference

  between everything in life and you?

  Remember how large you felt?”

This offers electrifying clarity of imagination and an invitation to think, suddenly, in focus, about your innermost awareness of self.

That’s a fabulous outcome bubbling out of a few words.

Wish I’d said that.

Note: The curator of A Year of Being Here mentions that the provenance of the poem and the identity of the poet are not explicitly known, but that Myers is the likely author.

It's My Move

Nova

Evensong

The rain comes in...

Always

A new doorway....

When is a poem finished?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Book review: A Thousand Mornings

Book review: A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver (b1935)

The Penguin Press, New York, 2012

82 pages

Mary Oliver does it again with A Thousand Mornings, a short collection of poetry that offers her signature realism and wholesome, literal evocation of her tasteful and spectacularly insightful reactions to the world around her, and around us.

The reader is never in doubt about what she’s saying—obscurity is not her thing, and disjointed word play and annoying sentence fragments are not her thing. I take instruction from Mary Oliver every time I read her work.

There is calm, quiet joy in her words. She invites the reader to respect stillness. Here’s an excerpt from “Today”

“…But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.”

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

Book review: The Kingdom of the Kid

A beautiful book

Not your daddy's book review....

"...the very best story of diablerie..."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Evensong

My haiku, “Evensong,” appeared in cattails, published by the United Haiku and Tanka Society, read it online here.

This is the published version:

one owl’s call
quickens my longing to sing—
my one note

Earlier, I wrote this version in the more familiar 5-7-5 syllable structure:

The owl, that one call,

quickens my longing to sing

only one note, mine.

I’m satisfied with both. I prefer the original version.

Other links to my poetry:

Juncture

Nova

O, patient sea

The Six Grandfathers

The art of Rafael Sabatini

The rain comes in...

Always

"...another little piece of my heart..."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Book review: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)

Book review: Les Liaisons Dangereuses

A book that makes language an erogenous zone….

This post has been moved to my new website:

Please go to the website to sign up for daily email alerts about new posts

http://richardsubber.com/not-a-garden-of-delight/

The art of Arthur Conan Doyle

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

By Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Creator of crime fiction and that ace crimestopper, Sherlock Holmes

I'm re-reading some of Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" adventures, including several that are new to me….yes, yes, of course I read "The Five Orange Pips" again, doesn't everyone?

This time I tried "The Adventure of Lady Frances Carfax" and "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and a few others.

Basil Rathbone as Holmes

I first read some of the exploits of Sherlock Holmes when I was too young to be entertained by anything but the action. With that constraint, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" was somewhat boring, and "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" was simply pedestrian. The Complete Sherlock Holmes languished on my "To Read" list for years.

Now I am an older, more aesthetic fancier of the agile mind and the haughty generosity and the dimensioned humanity of Sherlock Holmes. Time after time, Holmes austerely allows Lestrade to claim a vaunted reputation that is too often boosted by the singular and covert prowess of Holmes himself. Holmes always takes the opportunity to be genteelly solicitous to the frightened widow. Despite his loveless bachelorhood, he is charmed by young lovers and easily condones their righteous excesses. He can be excited by discovery, and clap at each revelation, with the innocence of a child.

Jeremy Brett as Holmes

And yet, the fabulous boarder at 221B Baker Street has no fear of the nastiest brute….Holmes will leap—leap!—onto the back of an escaping felon….he will defy the powerful and the villainous alike, in defense of the letter of the law and in obedience to humane justice….

Holmes is a good man.

His adventures are good reading, time after time.

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-art-of-mary-oliver_9.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/07/trash-talk-to-king-george.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/07/movie-review-brokeback-mountain-2005.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/06/review-bartleby-scrivener-story-of-wall_27.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/06/book-review-thieves-in-night.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/06/book-review-snow-goose.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/05/book-review-girl-with-pearl-earring.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/05/book-review-rita-hayworth-and-shawshank.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/01/book-review-farewell-to-arms.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-wisdom-of-harper-lee.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-art-of-rafael-sabatini.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/08/book-review-saint-martins-summer-by.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/01/book-review-financier-by-theodore.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-review-1491-by-charles-c-mann.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2011/09/book-review-cleopatra-life-by-stacy.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/01/wisdom-of-l-p-hartley.html

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2013 All rights reserved.

Book review: Girl With A Pearl Earring

Book review: Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

A slim offering of historical fiction about Johannes Vermeer's enigmatic portrait of an unknown young girl, circa 1665.

It's a breathtaking, tantalizing love story….tantalizing because Vermeer and the maid, Griet, almost embrace their passion, each stepping over the line without transgression, but not without hurt:

Vermeer, the worldly one, the master, tempted to the edge of the precipice…

Griet, the child innocent, heedless of her woman's heat, trespassing unaware and ever nearer to the mystery that she barely understands in the beginning….

She feels the lush weight of the earring, his fingertip sears her skin, she inclines toward his touch, trembles with a disembodied, virginal start of pain….

Quickly stilled, she sits for him.

He trembles—a long moment—with the rush of desire, masters it, and steps back to his easel, granting her a little more time in the childhood she is leaving behind, giving her a peace that will become a bereavement, a keening memory….

They look at each other, mute, apart yet bound, in flagrante delicto, withering, without joy….

The 2003 film

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/05/book-review-rita-hayworth-and-shawshank.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/08/book-review-saint-martins-summer-by.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2012/01/book-review-financier-by-theodore.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-review-1491-by-charles-c-mann.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2011/09/book-review-cleopatra-life-by-stacy.html

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2013 All rights reserved.

Book review: "The Financier" by Theodore Dreiser

First published 1912, Harper and Bros.

It's just amazing that Dreiser (1871-1945) wrote this gritty novel in 1912, before anyone even thought of derivatives, credit default swaps, sub-prime "liar loan" mortgages and no-fault (for bankers and brokers, that is) national financial meltdowns. Frank Cowperwood is the ethically-challenged "financier" whose star and fortunes rise so marvelously and then collapse with equal flare. He seems so absolutely convincingly contemporary that I had recurring transient episodes of reverse déjà vu as I followed his desperate ambition and burnout.

Frank is a first-rate villain. He burns his friends and enemies with equal disdain, he channels Gordon Gekko with suitably theatrical energy, and he is most deliciously unrepentant when his schemes go awry, his loans get called and his empire crashes around him.

I say "deliciously unrepentant" because, unlike his contemporary villainous free spirits of Wall Street, Frank promptly goes to jail for his crimes.


"The Financier" so obviously is the kind of novel that might be written by a baroque clone of Michael Lewis. If you'd like to work out a bit of the residual rage you feel about the man-made financial cesspool we've been wallowing in for the last few years, try this American classic.

Theodore Dreiser

Jerry Seinfeld talks about books.....

Dreiser is an under-appreciated, not quite muckraking 20th century writer

"Greed is good" a la Gekko

"The Financier"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2012 All rights reserved.