“Catch 22” in China
Posted: May 19, 2014 Filed under: articles, books, writing 2 Comments
A Chinese website, Tea Leaf Nation, reported last week that the Western term “Catch 22” has taken hold in the culture. A recent search on Baidu, China’s largest search engine, found more than 4.9 million mentions of “Catch 22,” which in Chinese literally translates “military rule clause 22.’” The term was coined by Joseph Heller in his enduring World War II novel of the same name. Google reports 625 million citations worldwide.
Two examples: In 2010, in Kunming, the local government released a regulation that forbade employers from hiring migrants who did not hold a residency permit there. But to obtain the permit, a migrant was first required to hold a steady job. Responding to public outcries, newspapers published stories with headlines such as “Does Kunming have its own version of Catch-22?”
In March, Xinhua, the Communist Party’s official wire service, ridiculed public officials and labeled a government policy “a Catch-22-style ruse” in an editorial.
David Auerbach’s Blog, Waggish
Posted: May 18, 2014 Filed under: articles, books, people, writing Leave a comment
I somehow stumbled across an essential blog, Waggish, which is made up of pungent, cogent essays on ideas and people relevant to the ongoing cultural dialogue, as exercised in politics, the academy, the media and pop culture. Auerbach’s net is wide-ranging, and refreshingly more concerned with ideas and the way the world is always grappling with issues raised in classical Western philosophy. He’s both deep and accessible, and strikes me as unusually fair-minded and not ideologically driven; he splits hairs and crosses his Ts. I’m following his blog now and it’s added good things to my perspective on our times. He’s also a technology writer for Salon, on the side.
Give his idea blog, Waggish, a try. And if you follow the technology press, his Salon column, Bitwise.
‘Decoded’ By Mai Jia
Posted: April 25, 2014 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
I started reading the first pages of “Decoded” on Amazon’s “Look Inside,” and I couldn’t stop reading. The eighth novel by Chinese writer Mai Jia, and the first to be translated into English, it’s about the line between insanity and genius. It unfolds around the life of a young, genius mathematician who is recruited to work in a secret code breaking unit. Around its edges, it flirts with the spy genre but at its core it’s a character study: of a family and of a wide range of gifted people who live in the world of the mind in a way that’s foreign to ordinary people. I immediately ordered this book, and I’ll look forward to more translations by this writer. Here’s a short interview with him in the Wall Street Journal, and also a link to the book on Amazon. Give the first 20 pages a read. It may grip you like it did me…
Updike Redux
Posted: April 20, 2014 Filed under: books, fiction, people, writing Leave a comment
Our suburban Henry Miller
John Updike’s literary stock, amazingly, fluctuates up and down. He was our disguised, suburban Henry Miller. He wasn’t interested in becoming a persona in his work, but he opened up the eroticism of the 60s and 70s. Some critics and writers rate him below his peers, usually citing his lack of angst, the jewel-like prose, and the ease with which his massive body of 26 novels, 18 short story collections, 12 collections of poetry, 4 children’s books, and 12 collections of non-fiction flowed from his pen. His fictional landscape has no peer, covering as it does detailed reports of American, white middle-class consciousness. His public persona and mild manners were camouflage for a deeply romantic, sexually aroused soul, which Adam Begley captures in a new biography, Updike. Also, here’s an interview with Begley, whose book has received tremendous reviews. I can’t wait for a volume of Updike letters. Updike clearly deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, but, alas, for many people in the literary game it takes decades to see the true meaning of a writer’s work. Unfortunately, he, Mailer and Roth were not honoured, but their work, along with Bellow’s, will stand with the books of the earlier American greats: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald… The last century of American literature overflowed with great writers who showed us America.
Begley is good on Updike’s prose style: “Aside from his enormous talents and Protestant work ethic, Updike’s defining characteristic is his signature style, which he owes to his desire to be a graphic artist, and to his stunningly visual memory. Like Proust, like Nabokov and like Henry Green, all of whom influenced him, Updike wrote sentences that work through the precise meeting of visual detail and verbal accuracy.”
See also this essential review of Begley’s biography, and Updike’s persona, by Louis Menand in The New Yorker here.
Peter Matthiessen’s New Novel
Posted: April 3, 2014 Filed under: books, buddhism, people Leave a comment
In Paradise, the name of Peter Matthiessen’s new novel, will be released soon, and it could be the last book in his one-of-a-kind outpouring of fiction and nonfiction. A beautiful tribute to him in The New York Times magazine can be found here.
Photograph copyright Damon Winter/The New York Times
Red Pine Has Two New Books Coming Out
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: books, buddhism, people, poetry Leave a comment
Red Pine has two new books coming out in the next couple of years, in addition to Yellow River Odyssey which will be released sometime this summer. The first is based on the poems of Stonehouse, and the second, Finding Them Gone, is the story of his pilgrimage to the graves of Chinese poets. Both will be published by Copper Canyon Press.
A River Runs Through It: The ending
Posted: March 23, 2014 Filed under: books, fiction, writing 1 Comment
The ending, and especially the last two paragraphs, of Norman Maclean’s masterful A River Runs Through It echo the Bible and the true American idiom:
“Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
“Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
—A River Runs Through It
Lawrence Durrell, from the Alexandria Quartet
Posted: March 13, 2014 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment“For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential – the imagination.” – From The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell, 1912- 1990
Durrell lived on the top floor of this house in Alexandria. While there, he wrote Prospero’s Cell.
Another Yellow River Odyssey Photograph by Red Pine
Posted: March 5, 2014 Filed under: books, buddhism, people, photography Leave a comment
Here’s one more picture from Bill Porter’s new book, Yellow River Odyssey, which should be released soon by Chin Music Press, a small publisher of elegant books based in Washington state. The caption reads: “After another hour among the dunes, we headed back to Shapotou, where I cooled my heels in the Yellow River mud and talked with several men who were inflating goat skins and lashing them to wooden frames to use as rafts. Sheepskins, they said, were useless. Goatskins were the only the skins that held air long enough, and they had to be coated on their insides with sesame oil to keep them from cracking and to maintain their flexibility.”
More Lonn Taylor
Posted: March 4, 2014 Filed under: books, people, places 1 Comment
Lonn Taylor, my friend who lives in Fort Davis, Texas, has a new book of essays, Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy. It follows up My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy, which was published in January 2012, and he continues his stories and essays illuminating the best of Texas geography, history, and personalities. See my essay on Lonn’s earlier book here. Lonn is revered in the Big Bend area of Texas, where he has a weekly radio show on Marfa’s public radio station KRTS, which is the place to go to hear a wide range of music from classical to Texas roots music.
