Book Reviews from 2020

What a great book. Bill Porter, known in Chinese as Red Pine, has for decades been an important figure in the world of translated Chinese poetry. His travel writings have also gained a huge following in China.

In thirty chapters, Porter describes a personal quest: spend thirty days tearing ass all over China in search of graves, hometowns, and shrines from the lives of important Chinese poets so that he can toast them with fine American whiskey. The book is not only a modern Chinese travelogue, but also a primer on Chinese poetry. Breaking up the travel narrative are over 200 Chinese poems, accompanied by Porter's translations.

Chinese title: 十个词汇里的中国. Chris Stasse, Alexi C., and I are reading and responding to this as part of a Chinese reading group. Each chapter is an essay prompted by a single two-character Chinese word. Below are the ones I've read so far; I'll definitely end up blogging more about this book.

• 人民 People
• 领袖 Leader (finished 2020-09-21)
• 阅读 Reading (read 2020-10-10)
• 7 more chapters... [edit: the middle chapters turned into a slog, and we gave up.]

[Not exactly a book, but I'm not going to make a "Plays" page when I don't read or see much theater.]

1. His own character being light, profligate, and perfidious, John easily attached to his person and faction, not only all who had reason to dread the resentment of Richard for criminal proceedings during his absence, but also the numerous class of “lawless resolutes,” whom the crusades had turned back on their country, accomplished in the vices of the East, impoverished in substance, and hardened in character, and who placed their hopes of harvest in civil commotion. To these causes of public distress and apprehension, must be added, the multitude of outlaws, who, driven to despair by the oppression of the feudal nobility, and the severe exercise of the forest laws, banded together in large gangs, and, keeping possession of the forests and the wastes, set at defiance the justice and magistracy of the country. The nobles themselves, each fortified within his own castle, and playing the petty sovereign over his own dominions, were the leaders of bands scarce less lawless and oppressive than those of the avowed depredators. To maintain these retainers, and to support the extravagance and magnificence which their pride induced them to affect, the nobility borrowed sums of money from the Jews at the most usurious interest, which gnawed into their estates like consuming cankers, scarce to be cured unless when circumstances gave them an opportunity of getting free, by exercising upon their creditors some act of unprincipled violence.

   Chapter 7

I've been looking through the Packard Humanities Institute's online version of Ben Franklin's papers.

The crouds of Coaches and Chairs for that Reason is not so great; Men as well as Women carry Umbrellas in their Hands, which they extend in case of Rain or two much Sun; and a Man with an Umbrella not taking up more than 3 foot square or 9 square feet of the Street, when if in a Coach he would take up 240 square feet, you can easily conceive that tho' the Streets here are narrower they may be much less encumber'd. They are extreamly well pav'd, and the Stones being generally Cubes, when worn on one Side may be turn'd and become new.

Letter to Polly Stevenson, Paris, Sep 1767. Franklin Papers 14:250

I quit reading this after ~100 pages, because I felt it could be summed up as "The Bonfire of the Vanities, but in Atlanta." I'd rather read something totally new than something which feels like a retread. I don't care if that's actually an unfair characterization; with so many other things to read, this didn't make the cut.

As with Slaughterhouse-Five, I dug this out of the box housing my high-school bookshelf to reread it with the benefit of--eep!--an additional ~decade of life experience.

William Mandella, the main character of the book, experiences total and utter alienation from the rest of the human race after spending hundreds of years traveling at light speed while only aging a few years. He was born in the 1990s, but ends the book living in the 3000s as one of just a dozen remaining 'original' humans.

Reread. Worth every second, as a plea for all people to be competent, self-reliant, and willing to live and let live.

Reread. The first time was in high school, but I didn't pay it enough attention at that time. [Response in progress]

Mote is successful because the authors have written science-fiction analogues to things they understand from the real world. [Response in progress]

On 2019-08-04, my friend Chris Stasse gave me this collection of stories (Chinese title: 老舍小说集). I've been working my way through the collection; as of today, I've read these stories:

• 《马裤先生》 (read my English translation)
• 《恋》
• 《月牙儿》
• 《不成问题的问题》
• 《歪毛儿》
• 《铁牛和病鸭》 (read my English translation)
• 《一封家信》
• 《热包子》
• 《老字号》
• 《大悲寺外》
• 《也是三角》
• 《柳家大院》
• 《东西》 [2019-12-04T12:14:16-0800: one of the two main characters has a fixation on the contrast between Western and Eastern schooling, manners, lifestyle, etc. The title is thus best translated as "East and West", not as "Things".]
• 《陈二哥加薪水》
• 《善人》
• 《同盟》
• parts of 《黑白李》、《上任》

Skillfully weaves together biographies and historical events from the Golden Age of Piracy, focusing on the lives and exploits of Henry Avery, Blackbeard, Charles Vane, and other major pirates in the West Indies (which includes the Caribbean Sea.)

A meditation on taste, culture, artistry, and aesthetics which is worth the read. I can't say I cared for the ending, but that's probably on me. Recommended to those who consider themselves artists or art enthusiasts.

Available for free online. My favorite part was Chapter 13.

Word list:

• gaberdine
• pelerine
• caftan

1. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string. pg 9

2. The way into the shrine was a round hole at the side of a hill, just a little bigger than the round opening into a henhouse. Worshippers and those who came to seek knowledge from the god crawled on their belly through the hole and found themselves in a dark, endless space in the presence of Agbala. pg 16

Excerpts:

To get salt to go in your bread in slavery, well, they would dig up the dirt where the fresh meat hung over and had been dripping salt, and would boil this to get the salt. They would get and parch sweet potato peelings to make coffee. You-all are blessed children; you are living on flowery beds of ease. I would to God sometimes that I was able to express myself.

Mr. Reed, in "A Negro Has Got No Name" - pg 25

Excerpts:

Did Frost know what he was going to do when he began [Stopping By Woods]? Considering the poem simply as a piece of juggling one cannot fail to respond to the magnificent turn at the end where, with one flip, seven of the simplest words in the language suddenly dazzle [...]

pg 674

Or suppose that there existed somewhere a religious order that imposed a vow not only of eternal silence, but against all verbalization even of one's thoughts. Initiaties, suppose further, must pray a certain number of hours each day, but they must dance their prayers. [...] Can there be any doubt that the kinds of postures and the sequences of actions such dancers could fall into could constitute not only a language but a language susceptible of great refinement?

pg 707

I skimmed through about a dozen of the interviews that make up this book.

1. In the tiny country of Malawi the winter is severe [...] May, June, and July, the cold months, are also the harvest months. This is the season when the village silos -- huge baskets on legs -- are filled to the brim with corn, the staple food of the Malawian. The oranges and tangerines are ripe; the second bean crop, the tobacco and tea are all being harvested and auctioned.

   Winter in Africa [July 2, 1965] - pg 12

1. Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long, vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no further. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky.

   pg 20 / Thin Cities 1

Word list:

• byre
• bannock
• tanist

Word list:

• gamine: n. a mischievous, playful, or elfish girl or young woman; a female waif or urchin.
• cassoulet: n. an oven-baked stew or casserole from southwest France, containing beans, meats, vegetables, and herbs.
• spile: n. a pile (anchoring post); a bung or spigot.
• splenetic: adj. (also "splenic") Ill-humored, irritable. [obviously related to "spleen"]
• vitiate: v. reduce the value of, impair, spoil, make ineffective, invalidate; debase, corrupt.

Stupendously D&D-able, the way that Fernand Braudel and other "histories of everyday life" always are. The first half of the book is about the myriad and variegated traditional ways of life in France up through ~1900; the lack of a conception of "France" as opposed to individual pays (tiny areas with fuzzy boundaries but strong identities); and the huge ignorance of the land's features and inhabitants in which most people persisted, for most of French history (not that anywhere else was much better). I kept finding parallels to what I know of China, past and present, with countless micro-cultures spread over a vast area. The second half concerns the growing of national identity; the bypassing of village, forest, and transhumance trail by railroad; the disappearance of folkways; and the replacement of ignorance of the contemporary with ignorance of the past.