Prufrock is off this week and will return on August 8.
Reviews and News:
Conservationists of camp save our roadside colossi from ruin.
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How terribly strange. Paul Simon four years beyond his Bookends prophecy.
“Simon’s tendency to check in with us every five years gives him plenty of time to fine-tune. And he’s not sure if he’s going back there. He’s dealing with his joy, but he’s jittery. Paul Simon is still crazy every five years or so. Let’s not give him an encore. Let’s just let him do whatever he feels like. Roth said that when he looked at the fridge and saw that declaration—the struggle with writing is over—it gave him strength. It’s a loss for us, but it seems to make him happy, for now, and it gives him time to micromanage his Wikipedia page and talk to his biographer. It’s hard to believe that Rhymin’ Simon is ready to pack it in yet. Again, on “Stranger to Stranger”:
“All in good time
Although most of the time
It’s just hard working
The same piece of clay
Day after day
Year after year
Certain melodies tear your heart apart
Reconstruction is a lonesome art
“Yes, we know it’s lonesome, and yet we know it’s too fun to be a job. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. If we’re lucky, Paul Simon, we’ll hear from you in five years. You will tell us, with chords, rhythms, and rhymes that don’t even exist yet, something that you predicted on “Bookends” way back when you were harmonizing with a guy called Art, except that you will raise it by a decade: How terribly strange it will be to be 80.”
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Charles Simic on Czech poet Jana Prikryl and “The Consolations of Strangeness“:
“This is occasional poetry at its best, relaxed, amusing, conveying the pleasure the poet took in each scene, while lounging in the shade of a big old tree (one imagines), jotting a few lines now and then in a small notebook, then perhaps dozing off and resuming writing the poem in bed late that night when everyone else was asleep. Goethe claimed this is the best kind of poem there is, reputedly using the naked back of the woman he slept with to scribble his verses on a sheet of paper. The old Japanese wrote brief, occasional poems, and so did the other ancients. “Do not ridicule the small./Little things can charm us all./Cupid was not big at all,” some unknown Greek said.
[…]
“Here’s the last poem in the sequence, as marvelous as so many others in this fine book:
The pines absorb the night, its themes and fabrics,
a lowering of blinds within blinds and glances perceiving glances,
till nothing of night remains in the air and the sky begins to demonstrate
again its essential property of flaring from all quarters
and all morning the pines sparely with a kind of jealous, pointed
attention unleash their reserves, granting each hour
before noon its cool underpinning and each pine
the work of expressing its individual silence”
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A hink pink is crossword-style clue leading to a pair of rhyming words, as in “trail mix at sci-fi speed” to “warp gorp.” Variations include hinky pinky for two-syllable rhymers and hink dink for partial rhymes.
For enough hink pinks to sink your morning, look here.
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Franz Kafka was silly like us.
“Since his discovery or global reinvention seventy or eighty years ago, our picture of Kafka has been fleshed out more than would once have seemed possible. The ‘quintessential archetype of the writer as a sort of alien: unworldly, neurotic, introverted, sick’, as Stach describes the old image (a sort of negative Rilke), was a long time ago now. Hence the joy of identifying Kafka (probably!) in a crowd scene in Merano; or, like Max Brod and everyone else, standing on his chair at an air show in Brescia. Or of turning up Brod’s mock-questionnaire on which Kafka obligingly detailed his weight, weight gain and general state of health. Through the pioneering and endlessly painstaking work of Hartmut Binder, Klaus Wagenbach, Stach and others, we have a physical and circumstantial Kafka who is not the gloomy, self-entrapped, religiose wretch of yore. We knew he was something of a dandy, did Swedish exercises, was a devotee of Quaker Oats and loved the prankish silent cinema. Here now are things to set beside these. He was attentive and sympathetic to little girls, read popular travel books, admired expressions of physical prowess – was, in Auden’s phrase, silly like us. And when Stach includes a piece called ‘What Color Were Kafka’s Eyes’ and quotes four versions (dark, grey, blue and brown) from a dozen impassioned observers, all categorical, all sure of themselves, we know enough other things about him to be comforted, and to be able to say to ourselves, pace Thomas Hardy: here was someone of whom such things were not noticed, as indeed a discretion about the conduct of his life and a dislike of fuss about his person seem to me properly ‘Kafkaesque’.”
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Essay of the Day:
Beset by Poké zombies? The 2006 essay “Pokemon and Japanese Remilitarization” offers a compelling a take on “Japanese cuteness,” possibly inspired by this 1999 South Park episode.
“Japan has never said much to the rest of the world about the after-effects of the occupation and its attempts at democratization, or about the bizarre position in which the nation has found itself. The problems with Japan’s democratization run deep. Even the concept of democratization needs to be treated as a problem, but so far neither the Japanese government nor the Japanese media has addressed these issues head on. But if little has been said explicitly about the occupation’s after-effects and about the troubles that have haunted postwar Japanese society, the problems have perhaps begun to be marked in another way. This is the meaning of Japanese cuteness.”
Read the rest here.
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Poem of the Day: “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” W.H. Auden, 1940
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Picture of the Day: Model dog.
