#50 - What Goes Around, Probably a Fly
A Few Tanka; The Media Circus and its Clowns; Encyclopedic Hobbies
Hello, my friends,
Illness has struck again, loudly this time in the form of coughs, deep, shallow and disruptive. For a couple of days all sorts of complications kept me from work, but by mid-week I began again. Thankfully, working from my little closet, I scared no one but dust mites with my massive, full-body hacks. Life goes on with these ultimately minor discomforts. My energy level is good and I’m happy to share HMF with you.
For some reason, this week (maybe this year?) has seen me return to interests of ten or more years ago. On Wednesday, Facebook reminded me that on January 31st, 2010, I ran my first haiku workshop (“Spring Rain Haiku Workshop”). Though I wasam very much a neophyte in the form two veteran poets, Naia and Debbie Kolodji, were in attendance and helped make the workshop worthwhile. I also started reading Sherwood Anderson again. In February of 2011, I first read his short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio and spent the next couple of years expanding it’s Wikipedia entry (much of it is still as I wrote it, btw). What’s old is new again!
A Few Tanka
You might remember that last week I shared a few haiku from a book I was reading, Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry translated by Edith Marcombe Shiffert and Yūki Sawa (Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1972), today I’ve pulled out three tanka by Taeko Takaori:
A magpie bird, singing, is pointed out to me -- moving the umbrella -- the boat being turned with the oar - there, just ahead!
A masterful poem displaying how a poet can play with the reader’s attention. First, the magpie’s singing is heard off to the side in passing, then the bird is pointed to with the umbrella (“Ah, now we see it!”). A neat scene shown us in three lines. Yet, the umbrella is an appropriate pivot here since it moves us along to the introduction of the boat — a surprise that changes the entire scene in our minds — as it is maneuvered, along with the umbrella, until the magpie is front and center for all, poet and reader. “There, just ahead!” we’re told, for our viewing pleasure, is the poem’s subject. Yet, haven’t we been listening to it singing the entire time?
The translators of this volume chose to prioritize the integrity of the lines in Japanese at the expense of clarity in English, creating some awkward phrases. Despite that, I found rewards in reading patiently and rereading with slightly different cadence and pauses. Oftentimes, the charm of the poems eventually emerged.
Cast upon the ground the shadow of my own self is being walked through while my back is carrying the brightness of the moon.
Here is a poem that benefits from multiple passes. I would have chosen a more straightforward approach: “Walking through / the shadow / I cast — / carrying the moon / on my back.”
Yet, “is being walked through” is a nice way to juxtapose the first and second parts of the poem. To the subject, the moon is unseen but perceived; the weight of it’s brightness in contrast with where the walker’s attention actually is, the darkness of her shadow. Again, as in the first poem, there is a combination of the sense of sight and something else — in the former, sound, here touch.
Anyway, I just love the image of carrying the moon on one’s back. An impromptu haiku comes to mind:
mid-autumn walk -- carrying the cold moon on my back
The pedestrian’s relationship with nature reminds me of one of my favorite haiku:
walking with the river the water does my thinking (Robert Boldman)
I don’t think the following poem would fit within the criteria of a “death poem” since the focus is not on death itself but a perception from a day of life, and yet if I were to write a death poem, just the last two lines would do very well for me.
As on this day after I die also there will come again from young persimmon leaves a tapping sound of rain.
Though death comes for each of us, nature’s routine is uninterrupted.
The Media Circus and its Clowns
Is it just me or does this Stanley cup trend seem totally off-the-wall? One of my Facebook friends posted a video of, apparently, people rushing to grab the cups from a display at some store (probably Target). But in examining the video, it didn’t really show what it was purported to show; a few people came to the display, got a cup, came back to the display, then someone else came to it. It looked frenetic at first glance, but it was actually fairly staid. So my big question is: Are there really that many people going crazy over thermos mugs? I don’t (think I) know anyone personally who has woken up early and camped out at a store so they could sport a special sippy cup. So my suspicion is that the whole thing is a vicious cycle of a few weirdos going wild over a common item that was reported on, and that reporting was borrowed and borrowed and repeated and amplified until it seemed like it was an actual “thing”. And along the way, a few other people and entrepreneurs jumped on the bandwagon so it became a very slightly bigger deal, but still. I can’t imagine that most people truly care about this stuff.
I had that thought before and I was reminded of it again with the equally oddball media reportage of people (mostly men) getting angry at Taylor Swift for going to her boyf’s football games. Apparently because they were showing her on camera too much and distracting from the game??? Is this really something that enough men feel that it’s indeed worth talking about? Off the top of my head, I would think that 99.5% of football fans either have no opinion at all about this since she only goes to Chiefs’ games and they’re just one team (that’s going to the Super Bowl) or if they’re mildly annoyed (very mildly) it’s might be worth a shrug or a “meh”. This must be that phenomenon where someone thinks there must be at least a few people offended by some innocuous thing (a pop star going to football games) and so they find those people and put them on the mic. Pull the lever on the internet’s butthurt machine and through repetition it becomes a fact that “Guys are angry about Taylor Swift going to football games” when in reality it’s 0.001% of football fans that care at all.
It’s all just so much noise, these fake trends. Thankfully, my life and the people I interact with are at enough of a distance from these ridiculous manifestations that I don’t need to countenance them other to than to squint my eyes and cock my head like a confused dog, before shaking it off and going about my business. Likely when Michael and Sophie become teenagers, I’ll hear all about the random crud young influencers are on about. Until then, my diamond-encrusted collector’s edition Stanley cup and I will go yell at the screen whenever Taylor comes on. Plot twist: I’ll be yelling lyrics to her songs!
Encyclopedic Hobbies
I first learned of and read American author Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) in 2011. A year or two later, I had a shelf full of his books, biographies (five of them), and literary criticism (including two bibliographies, a critical edition of his 1921 Paris notebook, and letters). I suppose I may have gone a little overboard. It’s very possible that I’ve now read more about Sherwood Anderson and his writing than his own literary output. What happened?
Well, it started like this: I really liked Winesburg, Ohio (an immediate 4/4 in my rating system), Anderson’s collection of related short stories centering around a small mid-western town at the turn of the last century. It was a coming-of-age story of young writer, George Willard, as well as perceptive stories centering on other town residents. And perceptive is the keyword here, though at his worst Sherwood Anderson is vague to the point of nonsense, at his best he conveys the uniqueness of each character in, essentially, a perfectly average town of nobodies until you can feel their thoughts even as they struggle to speak to each other. It’s truly a beautiful book, with stories carefully told in the unhurried mode of a teller whose sitting with an audience that has time to understand.
So read (in reality I listened the audiobook) Winesburg, Ohio and loved it and, of course, wanted to learn more so I visited its Wikipedia page which, at the time, was really not very much. This disappointed me! Here was this amazing book that deserved more (a lot more) from the “The Free Encyclopedia.” What if others like me loved the book and went there. They wouldn’t learn anything! So I took matters into my own hands.
Since Wikipedia is written by volunteers, if I wanted the entry on Winesburg to be better, I was the one that had to do it. But, you must understand, making small corrections, adding citations, or inserting a few words here and there is easy. Writing an entire article on a reasonably well-known book is a challenge and responsibility. If I was going to do it, I had to do it right, and I knew nothing about Sherwood Anderson and his book other than what I had heard in the introduction. So, yes, I used all of my librarian superpowers and some of my paychecks to locate and amass the high points of Anderson criticism and read a lot of it. If you scroll down to the Sources section of that article you’ll see some. I read and shaped what I read into encyclopedic text, a special type of genre writing.
Along with Sherwood Anderson, I also picked up the hobby of editing Wikipedia generally. While I mostly worked on Anderson and other literary articles, I also went in other directions (for instance, I created the article on the Washington Summit (1987) at an Edit-a-thon at the Ronald Reagan Library). Eventually, though, I was deep into working Sherwood Anderson’s own biography page and ran out of steam for both Wikipedia and Anderson himself. You can actually see in that article exactly where I stopped working on it. Look at how in-depth it is through the “Nervous Breakdown” section, I added that on November 11th, 2013. After that it’s pretty loose with the chronology and flimsy with the citations.
At the end of last year I decided that during the first quarter of this year I’d read more books off my own shelf (as opposed to the library’s, etc.) and started browsing my Sherwood Anderson collection. Currently, I’m listening to the audiobook of the wonderful short story collection The Triumph of the Egg (1921) — it’s on Hoopla for you library nerds — and recalling why I enjoyed reading Anderson so much. My plan here was to write my impressions of that collection, but as you see, I got sidetracked with a little personal history. Maybe next time!
Early morning before coffee
Oleg, Sherwood, Haiku
a good morning*
*spontaneous unedited phrasing
I'm just dropping in on a break from writing this morning, but I thought I'd leave you with my favourite magpie literary creation: https://open.spotify.com/track/0u81tCCAYxKd6wJ6hoYNr2?si=cdd2917b9eb548f1
PS I'm also a habitutal Wikipedia editor, though I've never tried for a whole entry -- kudos for getting as far as you did! I took a tour through it -- impressive work!!