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Buoy the population of the soul
Toward their destination before they drown
~ Robert Pinsky
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A Note on Book Reviews



I have personally come to prefer The Guardian's coverage of books, and other arts over the New York Times's, mainly because of its expansive scope and heterogeneity. Besides The Guardian Book Review that covers poetry every week will outrank the more "journalistic/current affair-sy" NYT Book Review in my scales any day. Then the essays and excerpts Guardian prints are far more extensive than that can be found in NYT.

I also like the fact that Guardian doesn't maintain scores, i.e., best selling lists like the ones found in NYT; whose lists which have now become the de facto Dow Jones index of a book's sales popularity here in the United States, never mind its intrinsic worth or the lemming effect (or should we call in the tipping point effect that made Caldwell’s "Tipping Point" a NYT bestseller?) such lists may induce in the reading populace.

So here are some pieces worth reading from this week's Guardian Review: Doris Lessing's essay on D.H. Lawrence's life and "Lady Chatterley's Lover". I would also recommend Geoff Dyer's "gate crashing" book, "Out of Sheer Rage", which I haphazardly plucked up for a dollar, and enjoyed immensely to the DHL fans. A review of Tom McCarthy's "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", which says Steven Spielberg is making a Tintin movie. I am buying tickets in advance for this one. This one should be of interest to certain hill-rollers I know of in Merry Olde England. If Dr. Johnson did it, so can they!!




My Daily Notes

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Snake Handling



Warning: This piece has scenes of graphic voilence

I unleashed my anti-Buddha nature today, and assassinated a lovely copperhead. My karma is thus weighed down by one more death, and consequently I will rotate once more in the great carousel of samsara.

All this happened in the course of a morning when I was over at VILLA sending some faxes out. The snakey was sitting in a bed of pine straw, and was nearly invisible. Since I usually tool around woods here, gathering "degradable sculptures", I usually keep a wary eye for these beautiful fellas (these are the predominant posionous snakes in these parts), and also for good measure wear my thick hiking boots. Usually they are quite shy, and try to crawl away from me more quickly than I from them.

But this snakey was different. Yes sir, it gave us (two others gathered around to look) the eye, and refused to budge from its bed. This was perhaps because it was a fully grown adult (about 3 feet long) and had just eaten lunch. This is when a lady guest currently staying at VILLA arrived, and gave a shriek after seeing what she called the serpent. So I had to get a shovel, and jab it into the snakey's neck just below its triangular head (easy clue to identify copperheads). Oh, it refused to perish for the ground was too soft, and the shovel dug into the dirt along with its body. So after I was sure I had stunned the snakey enough, I slid its wiggly body onto the shovel and carried it out to the parking lot and laid it out. And then completed the business of guillotining the head by running the shovel along the pavement with the snakey's neck held in between metal and cement.

A streak of poison, the opening of fangs, the detachment of head, the spurting of crimson blood, and the wriggling of the sleek body, yes, these followed. I was almost tempted to slip the body into a bag, bring it home, and somehow skin it. But under the watch of the ladies, I had to load up the body in the shovel and fling it into the woods for the Garuda bird.

...

It was only afterwards I realized what an unfortunate wretch I am. Only had I belonged to a Holiness Church, I would have bravely embraced the snakey, put it in my pocket, and used it to call upon the Holy Spirit every day, for as the Lord said in Mark 16:18, the King James Bible:

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Instead, here I am writing out notes on what will soon become an apocryphal memory.




My Daily Notes

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Points of Departure: Sunday Readings



Stephen Fry’s excellent speech on history and its necessity and meaning to living

A Foreign Policy essay on solving the “10/90” problem in global public health, and the solutions for diseases that don’t have money in them for capitalism’s invisible hand

In view of my recent perusal of “The Gulag Archipelago”, I find the madness that is emanating from North Korea to be fascinating. Pico Iyer in his book “Falling Off The Map” has an excellent chapter on his visit to Pyongyang (among other “lonely” places such as Bhutan, Burma etc) in the late 1980s. And this is an extensive site to look at if anyone of you wants to visit the “illustrious commander, endowed with outstanding commandership art and matchless courage and pluck” of North Korea.

J.M. Coetzee is one of the contemporary writers whose elliptical style of revelation in writing is something I consider a great personal influence. Pondering on soon to come shifts in my life here, I took down the second volume of Coetzee’s wonderful memoirs “Youth”, which been sometimes described as “The Portrait of a Young Man as a Thwarted Artist”. Here is an extract from this book. You may also listen to Coetzee read sections of this work (featuring Ganapati at IBM) over at the Lannan Foundation’s excellent and extensive audio archive of readings.




My Daily Notes

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