Recently in Book Commentary Category

The Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize-winner JoséSaramago is a stubborn atheist, an unreconstructedCommunist, an ornery political polemicist ó and thecreator of some of the world’s most magical, imaginative,sweetly lyrical fiction. [From The Unexpected Fantasist]

Nassau Rejects Poet Nominee Over Words About War in Iraq:



The work of the man who would have been Nassau County’s first poet laureate included harsh criticism of the Bush administration....

Jessy Randall, a past contributor to 2River--Dorothy Surrenders--has just had her first full-length collection of poems, A Day in Boyland, published by Ghost Road Press.

Long before Michael Largo appeared in an early issue of 2RV, he was collecting statistics and information on the American way of dying. In October 2006, HarperCollins will release Final Exists: The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of How We Die, Largo's illustrated sourcebook on the various ways of dying. Visit Final Exists to learn about (and order) Largo's eye-opening and irreverent look at the truth behind kicking the bucket.

Podiobooks is the kind of literary site that I hope takes off. Its goal is to podcast books in serial form. Sort of like Dickens who serialized his novels. Subscribers to the RSS feed for each book receive a new chapter each and every week, which they download to their computers or MP3 players. The selections at the moment at Podiobooks are limited, but the site is a great idea and perhaps can bring back the serial novel, this time in audio.

Some people might think of Starbucks as the WalMart of coffee: a Starbucks opens its doors and an independent coffee shop is out of business. Nonetheless, I like Starbucks. Whenever the balance of my Starbucks card drops below $5, it's electronically reloaded with $50 from my checking account. The only thing I dislike is that Starbucks doesn't have a free hot zone for wireless computing but instead lets you pay to go online via tMobile. The good news is that there's a Krispy Kreme with a free hot zone across the street from the Starbucks I go to; its signal is strong enough that I can pick it up from inside Starbucks.

Perhaps I'm naive, but Starbucks does seem to have a conscious. It recycles its coffee grounds, buys coffee from independent coffee farmers in other countries, and sponsors projects to better communities. Starbucks even has a culture of music and literacy.

Today in my mailbox was a gift from Starbucks: a little book of poems called Poems from the Coffee Lands. The postcard size book has poems from Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama. Some of the poets are familiar (Octavio Paz and Jimmy Santiago Baca from Mexico, for example) whereas others are writers I've never heard of (Kifle Bantayehu from Ethiopia and Duda Machado from Brazil). All in all thirty two pages of poems, eight countries, and 14 poets.

Here's one I especially like by Micere Githae Mugo from Kenya:

I Want You to Know

I want you to know
how carefully
I watered the tender shoots
you planted
in my little garden.

Flowers now adorn the ground
the fruits are ripe
Come
bring a strongly woven basket
and bring with you also
the finest palm wine
that your expert tapping
can brew
we must feast and wine
till the small hours
of our short days together

Joy and love
shall be our daily
harvest songs.

Poems from the Coffee Lines is filled with poems like this. I'm not sure I'll take it to Starbucks with me. I'm afraid I might leave it. But it is a book of poems that ought to be passed around.

I think the order of Dan Brown's books, from earliest to most recent, is Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and The Da Vinci Code. I'm limited at discussing what makes a novel good. but I think Brown has gotten better with each book he's written.

The first novel I read was The Da Vinci Code. I liked it a lot. I liked its blending of religion, art, cryptography, and science, and most of all conspiracy. Then I read Angels and Demons, which I didn't like that much. The book seemed to episodic, moving from one murder to another, with the outcome predictable. Though I didn't enjoy the book that much, I did enjoy seeing how the writing style sort of developed into Brown's style in Da Vinci Code.

Digital Fortress, which I just finished, was also a letdown. It wasn't all that believable, it was too contrived, I could predict where the story was going. Maybe it read like an author's first novel. But as I was reading I kept thinking you could simply substitute the code breaking machine with any other machine and still have the same novel.

Now I'm reading Deception Point, originally so I'll have read all of Brown, but now because I'm really enjoying the story. It's the same style as DF but the plot is more complex, more engaging.

I mentioned in a blog entry some months ago that I had re-read The Iliad after a 25-year hiatus and found it mighty bloody, and also with plenty of application to certain current events in the Middle East and Washington, D.C. A reader commented on the translation I had used (Robert Fagles'), stating a preference for E.V. Rieu's prose translation. I can't argue with that--not only because the reader takes a much more professional approach to the text than I, but also because I'm a sucker for the line, which I enjoy more than any other kind of writing in American English.

Little did I know at the time that Hollywood was in the last stages of editing the Epic Film Starring Brad Pitt (and a Cast Whose Names Are Destined to Go Unremembered). Damn, I missed it. Now, I have to wait for the DVD.

Recently, I overheard two women discussing film. The film's Helen, in their opinion, didn't have the face to launch a thousand ships, but the men sure did! Can't you see it? A Queer Eye for the Warrior Guy production!

I am reading A New Theory for American Poetry, by Angus Fletcher, the Renaissance scholar who has dedicated himself to a more universal inquiry than just the 1600s and 1700s. The book is about Whitman. And John Clare. And John Ashbery. It is founded upon environmentalism and poetics. Its chief idea is the "environment-poem." And what Fletcher means by "theory" in the title is precisely this--poetics and the environment that a poem makes and that makes a poem.

He writes a fascinating chapter on "The Whitman Phrase," claiming that it is modeled on the wave in its ceaselessly repetitive nature, its movement-without-destination. He writes equally engaging chapters titled "Clare's Horizon" and "Diurnal Knowledge." He makes a wonderful argument in a sub-section titled "Describing the Nondescript." The environment of which Fletcher writes, that is, is something much grander and far less purposeful or directed than the environments of modern-day "nature poets" or the Romanticism of two centuries ago. It is directing in the sense that environment has created the American poet (or political idea or science or economy); and Whitman was the first to recognize this.

It's sometimes a slog of too-academic discourse: "If then, among central attributes of the descriptive, there is a power to place inventories in motion (if only as the result of adding up a sequence of discoveries), the descriptive implies an ever receding horizon."

Still, the book is extremely well constructed for having been written out of a series of investigations, papers, and readings over a broad expanse of years in the late nineties. Not to mention prepared for via an earlier career in Renaissance literature! There is much to learn here about yourself as a poet and as an American.

End note: I recall a classmate in graduate school at Indiana University, in the middle seventies, attempting to write a term paper on the fugue quality of Whitman's style. (Fletcher makes numerous comparisons to music in the poetry of Whitman as well.) My classmate surely was sensing this wave association in the contrapuntal aspect of the fugue? Alas, he didn't take his argument beyond mere analogy (that is, into theory), and, as I remember it, our professor didn't buy the analogy.

Here's an interesting literary review. I read a very well done review in it at lunch today, by Scott Hightower, of Richard Howard's new book of poems, Talking Cures. Well, it's actually a reverie of Hightower's relationship to Howard (he was a student at one time) and the poetic voice Howard represents. In fact, the poem quoted in the review comes from an older book!

He closes with a very reassuring observation:

"Our poets make our poetry . . . One by one the poets give voice to our realm, our humanity, and fill our slandscape with our collective exploration: the observing, generating self engaged in speaking ourselves through time. Talking cures."

I very much like this sense of history, the historical conversation or polylogue that poets and poetry represent for any society, nation, culture. Hightower's strikes me as the appropriately Romantic tone for our bloody new century: individual and inclusive (undeniably so), measured and ambitious.

Now, if he can only let himself release literature from its chains, as in:

" . . . Howard consistently delivers the proportion and perspective an educated reader can expect from 'literature.'"

No shame, I think, in using that word again, since all educated readers will agree that it means so much more (other?) than the white male canon from which all educated readers have been liberated.