will read for food

ba salam o ehteram
omid varam haleton khob bashe

man karatono didam , vaghean mahsharan !
ehtemal dare ye order pisheton dashte bashim !

mikhastam ghablesh gheimate 2 chizo bedonam
tarahi psd hosting ( only psd va bedon code )
tarahi kol ( graphic o code )

lotf konid ba takhfif begid hatman !
chon karaye ziadi darim age ke enshalla biaym mozahemeton shim
pas rah biayn :)

tanx

(via email, in comic sans)

From the randomly-opened pages of the Complete Poems of John Keats, (Modern Library Edition):

Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep
Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden’s veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.

–from “Sleep and Poetry”

The UPS truck
doesn’t  stop, or even slow–
this makes the dog sad.

I can’t believe it took me so long to find this book. Tete-Michel’s An African in Greenland was first published in 1981, republished twenty years later, and it was ten years after that it came to my attention–and I’m the kind of person who goes looking for books. It makes me wonder many things, like what else is out there still waiting to be discovered, and would the book have survived to be found if it only existed as a digital file on some server?

This passage belongs in my collection of “rooms full of books” even though there isn’t a book in the room at all. It is, however, a library: kept by an old Inuit man who lives in a turf hut in Upernavik, Greenland–well above the Arctic Circle.  The world is a curious place.

In his own way, old Robert was a “bookworm” whose favorite reading matter was restricted entirely to periodicals. Every week for many years now he had been getting hold of magazines dealing with “world affairs.” And even now when he avoided going out as much as possible because of the curiosity his appearance aroused in the village—his wife, his daughter, his youngest son Niels, aged fifteen, and his two married sons who also lived in Upernavik, continued to buy them for him. But therein lay the rub: these magazines, reviews and newspapers began to make such a clutter on the floor that one day old Rebekka suggested throwing them out the window. Alarmed, the old man began sorting out this junkheap and pinning on the wall the articles he wanted to reread. And so—casually, almost unintentionally—a first layer of printed pages spread over the four walls, followed in time by a second layer, a third, and even a fourth layer…The first pages dated from five years back and, as new pages had kept being added to the old ones, my host had great difficulty locating old articles or documents he needed.”

From An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie, published by nyrb classics, 2001.

Winter is a strange thing in the south, where we can have days that feel like summer, followed by weeks that certainly don’t. After starting the New Year with bright, warm weather we are now back to bright and cold winds. It is exhilarating to walk with the dog, but I’ve put my gloves on.

I’m still reading about Victorian women tramping in exotic deserts in search of antiquities to crate up and ship back to their “civilized” countries (where most remain to this day, but only the citizens of the original countries will call it “looting”). But in the meantime, in honor of the winter winds:

Avoid the month Lenaeon, wretched days, all of them
fit to skin an ox, and the frosts which are cruel when Boreas blows over
the earth. He blows across horse-breeding Thrace upon the wide sea and
stirs it up, while earth and the forest howl. On many a high-leafed
oak and thick pine he falls and brings them to the bounteous earth in
mountain glens: then all the immense wood roars and the beasts shudder
and put their tails between their legs, even those whose hide is covered
with fur; for with his bitter blast he blows even through them although
they are shaggy-breasted. He goes even through an ox’s hide; it does not
stop him. Also he blows through the goat’s fine hair. But through the
fleeces of sheep, because their wool is abundant, the keen wind Boreas
pierces not at all; but it makes the old man curved as a wheel. And it
does not blow through the tender maiden who stays indoors with her
dear mother, unlearned as yet in the works of golden Aphrodite, and who
washes her soft body and anoints herself with oil and lies down in an
inner room within the house, on a winter’s day when the Boneless One
gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home; for the
sun shows him no pastures to make for, but goes to and fro over the land
and city of dusky men, and shines more sluggishly upon the whole
race of the Hellenes. Then the horned and unhorned denizens of the wood,
with teeth chattering pitifully, flee through the copses and glades, and
all, as they seek shelter, have this one care, to gain thick coverts or
some hollow rock. Then, like the Three-legged One whose back is
broken and whose head looks down upon the ground, like him, I say, they
wander to escape the white snow.

–Hesiod, from Works and Days (via Project Gutenberg).

January 2 2010 Warm, in the mid sixties, with an unsettled sky.

It’s my favorite kind of sky—the kind that blows dark clouds across slanting sunlight and you can just feel the rain coming on. It’s hard to do anything but walk and look, so that is mostly what Ray and I did, with Tacitus in the earphones as a kind of sound track to the weather. I’m coming back to Tacitus, actually, having gone through the Histories at some point last year. I think when I was trying to come to terms with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus—which was a struggle. Tacitus was among his source materials, and therefore I decided to read him. Because lately I’ve been reading with the idea that context is everything, and because I’ve always been willing to be blown (like the clouds above me this afternoon?) across literature from book to book to book.

Tacitus, it turns out, is better than Hesiod for gardening. Especially the kind of gardening that requires attacking last year’s recalcitrant weeds and clumps of grass and digging them out of the beds with nothing more than a hoe and a pair of hedge clippers. He’s all mutinies and violence, murder and machinations and dreadful punishments, is Tacitus. But he still manages to bring out the character and the nature of the men he writes about. It sounds like absolute madness from my perspective (as I hack hack hack away), but there is virtue there. And I can almost believe it when Edith Hamilton writes that the great gift of the Romans to civilization was the rule of law.

January 1 2011 Sunny and 68 degrees.

I’ve been in the garden, obviously. Sawing up old trees with the pruning saw mom and dad bought me, and feeling profoundly grateful for the leather gardening gloves they bought me as well. The beds are laid out, now I just need the extra dirt and compost.

I was listening to Hesoid, Work and Days, while I raked, sawed, hoed, pruned, clipped and cleared. I thought it would be appropriate. I went through it twice, but I think I’m going to give up on him. I like the notion of these long poetical works on practical and scientific subjects—Hesiod on farming, Lucretius on science (“the nature of things”), Virgil’s Georgics. But while Virgil is very beautiful, filled with vivid pictures of working the lands in season, and while Lucretius still manages to sing-song his way to a theory of an infinite universe (I love that his “proof” that all matter contains empty space is contained in the fact that you can hear sounds in another room, even if the door is closed), Hesiod is none of these things. His poem is pedantic and dry. It may be the translation that is wanting, but since the translator of the version I’m listening to is Richmond Lattimore, I think not. Mostly it is—at least on agriculture—a collection of directives: “On this day, sow your corn. On this one, harvest your grapes.” Useful, no doubt, but a far cry from Virgil, who tells us how birds fly up all of a sudden when they sense an oncoming storm, and how the light from the oil lamp in front of the girls working at their looms will gutter without warning, in portent of the same. Or how to tell if the soil of the land is light and good, or sour, by filling a leaky basket with the dirt and pouring water through, so that you can taste the run off for bitterness or salt.

If I had an ounce of poetry in me I’d write something like Georgics for my garden, which is, at the moment, a collection of raked and empty beds. Like my empty bookcases from last week, they are all potential and possibility.

This excerpt is from Todorov’s Zift: Socialist Noir. Because there is nothing more noir than a filled bookcase in a socialist country. The character speaking is called “Moth.”

On the wall across from the cabinet was a dusty bookcase containing all sorts of books. It gave me pleasure and peace of mind to sniff old books, to read their titles, feel their spines, inhale their dust. The smell of a well-bound book cures the ailing soul. I don’t know why, but it’s a fact already recognized in olden times by the monks who invented the ingredients of the glue used to bind books. Old books breathe, and that’s why they smell; their breath is dusty because  it’s ancient.

My fingers started roaming the shelves and my eyes were chasing after them. I pulled out volumes at random, browsing and sniffing them, until suddenly I noticed a book placed upside down, with the letters facing downward. It was a volume of letters from jail by the poet-rebel Venets Tsvetarski, sentenced to death for revolutionary activity. It was titled Tenderness and Clamor, compiled by Bozhura Chepinska, a favorite sweetheart of the poet and a poet herself, published in Vienna in 1925.

I open the volume to the ribbon bookmark, turn on the desk lamp for added coziness, settle down comfortably in the armchair, and begin to read.

(After seeing the BBC production on DVD)

Oddly enough, King John is nearly the least interesting character in it. He doesn’t really come into his own until Acts IV and V, when things are going seriously downhill for him. But I suppose that’s par for the course in Shakespeare. It is our disintegrations that most interest the Bard.

In the BBC production, the show was stolen by Mary Morris (Queen Elinor), Claire Bloom (Constance) and the guy who plays Philip Faulconbridge, also known as Richard, “the Bastard.”  In fact, in terms of roles he’s the most interesting guy in the play. He’s kind of a running jester/cynic/commentator on what’s going on, although his cynicism gradually gives way to actual sense of purpose. He’s the only person in the whole play who develops as a character.

Mary Morris did a great job as Elinor, coming across as self-possessed and ambitious, and a bit scary–not above using seduction if the occasion calls for it. (Some really strange scenes there between her and the Bastard, who becomes, in effect, her knight). Shakespeare has a knack for writing impressive older women.

So the play was fascinating and frustrating by turns. The best parts and best lines went to characters who just vanish between one Act and the next. Through all of Act III Elinor and Constance rail at each other (and its a thing of beauty), then suddenly, they’re gone. Died, off stage, erased from the story. And suddenly too, the Dauphin–when introduced one might think a wet blanket had more personality than he–suddenly he’s front and center, leading invasions into England, sneering at all and sundry.

I know alot of my complaints are based on a modern sense of narrative and character development, but really, the whole story is so fractured, it’s hard to think about it in its entirety. I keep focusing on small scenes and actions instead. Lovely little bits like Hubert’s description of the civil unrest–of a tailor, in such haste to tell the news to his friend the smith that he put his shoes on the wrong feet before he ran out into the street:

I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailed and rank’d in Kent

I love stuff like that in Shakespeare. It makes you realize that he must have absorbed life like a sponge. Nothing seems too small to be unworthy of notice or comment.

King John, then, is a drama where the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. In this play, the men are mostly foolish, the women mostly wise, and the children all are sacrifices.

How is it that I never knew one of the greatest libraries amassed in Europe during the Renaissance–second only to the collection of the Medicis and the Pope,  belonged to an all but forgotten Hungarian king, Matthais Hunyadi, also known as Matthias Corvinus, the Raven King? The man whom Italy looked to keep the Ottoman Turks at bay, whose capital could only be reached from Italy by three months of hard traveling over a bandit-infested mountain wilderness, and who yet drew Italian scholars, poets and intellectuals to his court, (along with certain political prisoners and royalty in exile, such as Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and sometimes as Dracula). A man who was universally regarded as the ideal philosopher-king.

The King’s Trophy and Sanctuary

Then there was the library, the King’s trophy and sanctuary. Here, Naldo  Naldi wrote, sunbeams poured through high, stained glass windows, casting curious patterns on the vaulted ceilings. Beneath tall lancet windows, light fell on to the King’s couch, a ‘bed with golden coverings on which the royal hero is often wont to snatch some peaceful rest for his limbs.’ Here the King reclined, scrutinising a recently purchased illuminated manuscript, or chairing a debate between rival clerics or philosophers… (p.2)

In reverence of the Goddess of Wisdom

In the library, light also fell on to jewel-encrusted veils, set in place to shield the most expensive and cherished items of the collection from the bleaching sunlight. These books did not lie stacked upon one another in heavy chests like the majority of volumes. They stood upright on snakeskin tripods, waiting for the hand of the King, Queen, or the librarians, to part the curtain and reveal the liquid colors beneath.

According to Naldi, the curious bookrests attracted particular interest ‘because the spotted skin of a snake covered those tripods and a shining gold-colored cloth covered them, adorned with so many heavy gems and sparkling precious stones that you would think Matthias had accumulated whatever the kings of Persia are thought to have possessed.’ The Florentine likened the care lavished on these exotic tripods to Matthias’s reverence for the goddess of wisdom, for it was the tripods that ‘receive the greatest authors’ and wisdom itself that ‘opens the books that ought to be read, which the ancient ones composed, and which taught what wisdom was.’ (p.2)

The literary tastes of an alpha-male

The surviving 216 volumes, containing more than 600 works, show that Matthias had the literary tastes of a classic ‘alpha male’.  It has often been noted that he had a marked preference for secular as opposed to religious works. Indeed, once one subtracts liturgical aids such as bibles, gospels, psalters, missals and brevaries, which in any case belonged in the separate palace chapel library, there are not many books like Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, now kept in Melk Abbey, Austria, which can be categorised as devotional works. Even within the broad category of secular works from the library it is easy to spot Mattias’s particular enthusiasms: war stories, lives of great rules, and books about inventions, geography, medicine, natural wonders and the stars. (p.7)

–From The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library, by Marcus Tanner (Yale University Press, 2008)