21 August 2013

larryhammer: topless woman lying prone with a poem by Sappho painted on her back, label: "Greek poetry is sexy" (classics)
What I've recently finished since my last post:

The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch -- finally. Q's decision to not use Victoria's death as his end-point but continue on to just before the Great War is interesting, as it highlights continuities often silenced by the Story Of Modernism, though the selection itself silences in turn how much was actually changing. OTOH, I would be happier with the large amounts of religious verse if a) it wasn't entirely Christian (mostly explicitly, and the rest implicitly) and b) it covered a broader range of religious responses, including both more doubt/struggle and more mysticism. On the whole, I can't really recommend this collection -- the Ricks New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse was a needed replacement, and The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse is better still.

Poems of Places volumes 20-21, covering Russia and Syria. Regarding the first, when the best (or at least most memorable as good) poem in a volume is Byron's flawed "Mazeppa," its selection can generally be called a little weak. Part of this may be an aging effect: name-dropping Napoleon does not produce the emotional response it once did, and depictions of the Moscow campaign now need to develop their effects by other, more usual means. Volume 21 is the first of three volumes of Asia -- yes, Syria is one third of the continent, at least poetically speaking (it helps that the name encompasses greater Syria including Palestine). I went in expecting "Orientalism A-hoy!" but actually, this volume is far too wrapped up in Being Biblical to get much in. No doubt this means it'll be all the more concentrated in the Near-East-comma-Rest-Of and India-oh-yeah-plus-China-and-Japan volumes.

Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento. No additional notes. Cautiously recommended because the range of haiku subjects is a good corrective to the narrower selections usually translated, with the caveat that it's often wordier than it need or ought be.

Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaô volume 6, in which Our Hero's acceptance, at the end of the previous volume, of his purported destiny immediately sparks a full-on attack on his school by battalions of mage-soldiers, two ninja clans, a masked henshin hero, a flying aircraft carrier, and a masochistic piece of rubber. The worldbuilding has accumulated so much Weird Shit that it's starting to, if not be on crack, at least be cracked. Full confession: not only did I not expect the Big Bad to be [rot13]n gvzr geniryyre, yrg nybar bar bhg gb cerirag uvf shgher[/rot13], the reveal of what the gods are supposedly trying to do completely surprised me. Still not great literature and the consent issues of volume 1 still haven't been addressed, but it remains entertaining.

Madan no Ô to Vanadis ("The magic-bullet king and the Vanadis") volume 1 by Tsukasa Kawaguchi. During a stupid border war, a warrior duchess with a magic sword ("Vanadis" is her actual title) captures a minor earl and sets a ransom his fief is too poor to pay. As the deadline approaches, we come to see there's more to her rustic captive than meets the eye -- and that together they make a pretty good battle couple. Underneath the unnecessary troperiffic silliness, there's a decent high-fantasy novel in here. I have a sinking suspicion the incipient harem aspects will, in later books, wash out what's good.

Kino's Journey volume 2 by Kei'ichi Sigsawa. Further stories of an androgynous young woman and her snarky motorcycle as they travel the world, staying no more than three nights in any country. As with the first volume (read a few years ago in the official translation), I like the stories individually, but collected together the author's heavy-handedness gets, well, heavy.

What I'm reading now:

Poems of Places volume 22, which starts out with yet further delay of Orientalism A-hoy by the Classicism that pre-occupies Asia Minor -- which makes all the more startling this first appearance of full-blown orientalism wrapped in surprisingly explicit homoeroticism for the time and audience. (Not surprising that it was written, but that it was selected.)

Ruins of Many Lands by Nicholas Michell, a book-length poetic tour of the dead past based on the most up-to-date archaeology of 1850. This is a discovery from Poems of Places: the poetry is not Very Bad except in patches, but Longfellow's excerpts suggested there's enough amusement value to be worth tracking down anyway. Not available in a clean e-book, alas, though archive.org does have decent PDFs from an octavo edition (so they display decently on a small e-reader). Am only one chapter in, and wondering how Michell will vary his narrative enough to avoid tedium -- or, possibly, won't.

Current Japanese practice text is Midaregami ("tangled hair") by Akiko Yosano, the first (and most notorious) collection by one of the founders of modernist Japanese poetry. Definitely not court verse -- she is out to remake tanka into something new. I will say, though, I was glad to learn that native speakers find many poems confusing to understand. Slow going, but some good stuff.

A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin & Gao E -- my breakfast reading, replacing the Buson. Am up to chapter 7, as of this morning, so the narrative is still setting up the story (using an interesting variety of tactics to introduce different aspects). That's out of of 120 chapters -- this may take a while, especially since breakfast lasts only about half a chapter.

Oh, and the Tor.com story compilation, slowly.

What I might read next:

Maybe the next volume of either Sayonara Piano Sonata or Kokoro Connect. And maybe some poetry. Anyone know of something good?

---L.

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