Member: A_musing

Did I just open this window up and then cover "friendly response to kind words" elsewhere? Regardless, cheers to you!

posted by booksfallapart at 4:34 pm (EST) on Nov 8, 2009

Form your map, you don't appear to have read much literature from the Baltics. Have you tried Jaan Kross? I recommend 'Treading Air'.

posted by Third_cheek at 3:04 pm (EST) on Nov 8, 2009

I know of him, but I have not read him. What would you recommend for starters?

if you can get it, read Brodsky's essays collected in Less than One. He is quite the most brilliant writer on other people's poetry I have encountered. i refer to it constantly. I think for a poetry lover such as yourself, it's a must read.

I love berets, and Greek fisherman's caps.

posted by tomcatMurr at 10:03 am (EST) on Nov 6, 2009

Your review of A World Lit Only By Fire is spot on--I would only add that after reading, it it difficult to remember anything much about it. I think it became popular because it required no knowledge of history in order to read it, and left no residue afterwards.
I also liked your thoughts on A Distant Mirror. I marvel how Tuchman is able to fully enter different historical periods and make us see them so vividly. Perhaps if I were a better historian, I could find fault with her writing--but I am simply in awe. I would like to take your suggestion to read some of her critics; would you give me a particular recommendation?
Thanks.

posted by Banbury at 3:00 pm (EST) on Nov 5, 2009

I just wanted to pop over and congratulate you for you HOT REVIEW on "The Hour of the Star". It was a good one and deserving of the accolades. Well done!~!
belva

posted by nannybebette at 11:37 am (EST) on Nov 5, 2009

Forests of Europe
(for Joseph Brodsky)

The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

The inlaid copper laurel of an oak
shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head
as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath
of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite,
uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.

"The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva."
Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel,
the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves,
the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light
in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.

There is a Gulag Archipelago
under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring
of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains
as hard and open as a herdsman's face
sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.

Growing in whispers from the Writers' Congress,
the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse
of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard
of treaties and white papers as we lose
sight of the single human through the cause.

So every spring these branches load their shelves,
like libraries with newly published leaves,
till waste recycles them—paper to snow—
but, at zero of suffering, one mind
lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.

As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
under clouds vast as Asia, through districts
that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,
not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space
so desolate it mocked destinations.

Who is that dark child on the parapets
of Europe, watching the evening river mint
its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,
the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,
then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?

>From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,
under the airport domes, the echoing stations,
the tributary of emigrants whom exile
has made as classless as the common cold,
citizens of a language that is now yours,

and every February, every "last autumn",
you write far from the threshing harvesters
folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair,
far from Russia's canals quivering with sunstroke,
a man living with English in one room.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South
are prisons too, corruptible, and though
there is no harder prison than writing verse,
what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,
but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

>From hand to mouth, across the centuries,
the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,
when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,
a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase
whose music will last longer than the leaves,

whose condensation is the marble sweat
of angels' foreheads, which will never dry
till Borealis shuts the peacock lights
of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,
and memory needs nothing to repeat.

Frightened and starved, with divine fever
Osip Mandelstam shook, and every
metaphor shuddered him with ague,
each vowel heavier than a boundary stone,
"to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,"

but now that fever is a fire whose glow
warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates
exchanging gutturals in this wintry cave
of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside
mastodons force their systems through the snow.

by Derek Walcott

Eclogue 4
(to Derek Walcott)

In winter it darkens the moment lunch is over.
IT's hard then to tell starving men from sated.
A yawn keps a phrase from leaving its cozy lair. The dry, instant, version of light, the opal
snow, dooms tall alders - by having freighted
them- to insomnia, to your glare

well after midnight.

by Joseph Brodsky.
( I can't put the whole thing, it's really long....)

I remember years ago seeing a documentary about the two of them, in some cabin in winter, smoking like chimneys, drunk as skunks discussing Auden and Virgil together and laughing like cahoots.

posted by tomcatMurr at 8:25 pm (EST) on Nov 4, 2009

I remember reading somewhere that you love Derek Walcott?

I am reading slowly The Divided Child and am bowled over by it. Omeros, Midsummer and Tiepolos' Hound are the ones I am most familiar with - oh , and The Schooner Flight. Wonderful rich stuff.

You know about his great friendship with Joseph Brodsky?

posted by tomcatMurr at 8:20 am (EST) on Nov 1, 2009

I'm loving your contributions to the salon, A_musing! I may just have to splurge and get me a copy of this Clarel, just so I can stay on top of what all the fascinating fuss is about. Thank you for bringing it to us and for being a very cool contributor to the salon.

Best,
Brent

posted by EnriqueFreeque at 11:35 am (EST) on Oct 30, 2009

Given your feelings for Moby Dick you ought to check out http://www.librarything.com/topic/75957#

posted by slickdpdx at 8:11 pm (EST) on Oct 28, 2009

I really liked your review of Mohammed and Charlemagne. Pirenne is interesting reading--out of date and yet seminal.

posted by neopeius at 1:27 am (EST) on Oct 13, 2009

Hi there, and thanks! Ya know, I haven't been around much myself these days, it seems that somewhere along the line LT took a back seat to real life responsibilities. It's nice to hear from a friendly name, though.

Hope you're well :)
Dani

posted by philosojerk at 2:55 pm (EST) on Apr 26, 2009

Do you think Tim would let us advertise on LT for a Sanskrit scholar? :-)

posted by urania1 at 10:14 pm (EST) on Jan 5, 2009

Hey thanks. I just got in from a Dostoevsky reading group meeting that I run. I read your post. I will post later. There must be a Sanskrit scholar somewhere in the ranks of LT. My initial hope had been to attract an expert or two who might be willing to put up the the ignorance of a neophyte. Thus far, the hypothetical Sanskrit scholar is keeping a low profile.

posted by urania1 at 6:23 pm (EST) on Jan 4, 2009

We have a small ghost of a fray/debate going on the Mahabharata thread. Would you like to weigh in (or should that be would you like to in weigh)?

posted by urania1 at 1:12 pm (EST) on Jan 3, 2009

For me, Lambs under-appreciated gems are his letters. A writer's letters reveal more about an author than an autobiography because the author is writing from the heart.

posted by moibibliomaniac at 1:25 pm (EST) on Dec 12, 2008