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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Su Tung-P’o
Reading the Poetry of Meng Chiao Night: reading Meng Chiao’s poems, Characters fine as cow’s hair. By the cold lamp, my eyes blur and swim. Good passages I rarely fine— Lone flowers poking up from the mud— But more hard words than the Odes or Li sao— Jumbled rocks clogging the clear stream, Making rapids too swift for poling. My first impression is of eating little fishes— What you get’s not worth the trouble; Or of boiling tiny mud crabs And ending up with some empty claws.Read More