BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF READING (Sept. 2022)

“I could read inside an MRI machine if the book held
 me tight.Reading needs privacy which is too rare.  
I feel a relationship develops, and usually I don’t 
want to talk about it while I’m reading. And often 
after. It’s an intimate experience.”

Lynne Tillman in  “By the Book” in The New York Times
(August 7,2022)
**
THE LAST THING A JANE AUSTEN FAN WANTS
TO KNOW ABOUT ELIZABETH AND DARCY

“The last thing you want to know is that Elizabeth and
Darcy had a fight over how to treat the servants.”

Nora Ephron
**
There is no Frigate like a Book 
BY Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
**

MAKING EMILY DICKINSON VISIBLE

“Dickinson’s rhymes are a mask pointing to itself: 
they tell us something is wrong, something has 
altered or blurred from an identity which, by 
the pronounced lapse from it, it is thereby asserted 
to exist. The problem of Dickinson’s rhymes –if she 
was going to rhyme, why did she not do it more 
consistently? if she was not going to , why did 
she do it so much? – is suggested by an astonishing 
utterance  from her flood period, in which the 
nature of her poetry as a mistake is dramatized: 
‘Creation seemed a mighty Crack--to make me visible--.’”

Richard Howard.  Paper Trail:  selected prose, 
1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)
**
MOBY DICK AND THE HUNT FOR METAPHOR

" The hunt for an elusive whale is the most famous story 
in the history of American literature. Hast thou seen 
the White Whale? But as much as Moby-Dick is about the
quest for an animal, or for revenge, it's also about 
the quest for metaphor --the attempt to understand 
what cannot be understood.  Ishmael calls the whiteness 
of the whale "a dumb blankness, full of meaning." Full 
of many meanings, actually: divinity and its absence,
primal power and its refusal, the possibility of 
revenge and the possibility of annihilation. "Of all 
these things the Albino whale was the symbol," Ishmael 
explains. "Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"
 
       Leslie Jamison. "52 Blue" in Make It Scream, 
Make It Burn (New York:  Little, Brown and Company,
 2019)

**

MELVILLE & THE POSSIBILITY OF ENTRAPMENT

“Melville saw the possibility of an entrapment in
victory however nobly sought. War might be fought 
for human freedom, but victory might carry its 
own irony, the possibility of the great modern power 
state of unbridled capitalism and military ambition
 might herald a new and disastrous destiny.”

 Robert Penn Warren in his introduction to 
The Essential Melville (1987)
**
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED 
FROM STUDENTS IN MY
AMERICAN  LIT CLASS

Few students think it odd 
That Captain Queeg 
Is with Queequeg 
On the U.S.Pequod.
LJP

**
hi·ba·ku·sha
/ˌhēbəˈko͞oSHə/

noun
(in Japan) a survivor of either of the atomic 
explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945.
**


THE FINAL PARAGRAPH TO "HIBAKUSHA" in 
WAY OUT THERE:LYRICAL ESSAYS By MICHAEL DALEY
Michael Daley is a fine poet and essayist,
and "Hibakusha" is just one of his many
essays that  move me. Daley's prose and poetry
is enlivened by the honesty and openness of the
writer himself. 

On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 7:17 PM Michael Daley wrote me:

Dear Louis,
 "...Hibakusha." Originally, that was the title of 
the poem that precedes the essay in the book, and 
how I learned the meaning of the word from an article
 back in the day in probably the Seattle Times quoting 
a real survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. So, 
the poem is a found poem from that interview."

 I want to share with you the final paragraph
of "Hibakusha":


I want to share with you the final paragraph
of "Hibakusha". Michael Daley found a newspaper clipping in a book he had been reading –Life’s Pictorial World War II. The clipping told of Michael’s father, among other men,
 receiving an award for flying missions over Japan.

“I didn’t go to Vietnam. My Father paid that debt. 
I saw the faces from that book in those who came back.
 Although I tried to talk about anything else, to talk 
around it, I wanted to know what it would have been 
like for me. I wanted the same hollow at the end 
of a sentence and not call it despair, or loneliness. 
I wanted what they and my father had gotten from war:
I wanted my life justified too. But I could never 
know what they saw. Faces from that war were tattooed 
on their eyes; when they came, like me, to a noisy 
bar in a small waterfront town to watch an ordinary 
girl pour a glass of beer and lick foam from her lip.”

Michael Daley. Way Out There: Lyrical Essays (New York: Aequitas, an imprint of Pleasure Boat Studio, 2007)