Category: Book culture

Joyce Mansour

…Il n’a pas de gestes
Seulement ma peau
Et les fourmis qui grouillent entre mes jambes oncteuses
Portent des masques du silence en travaillent….

…There are no deeds
Only my skin
And the ants that crawl between my unctuous legs
Carry masks of silence while laboring….

— from the poem “Il n’a pas de mots” by Joyce Mansour, trans. Emilie Moorehouse, Poetry, June 2023, p. 244

Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) — so I learn from Marwa Helal’s introduction to the selection of Mansour’s poetry in the June issue of Poetry magazine — was born in London to a family of Egyptian and Jewish descent. She grew up in Cairo, where she spoke one or two contemporary Arabic dialects, and learned to read classical Arabic. She spoke Egyptian and Syriac, and read classical Arabic. After she married Samir Mansour, a Franco-Egyptian, she began writing poetry in French. She was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s, during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. She then lived in France, where she became associated with the Surrealists.

Helal warns us against simplistic interpretations of Mansour’s poems: “While some might try to categorize her work under the umbrella of Feminism™ [sic], Mansour was writing beyond the body and this world…. Par of colonization’s cruel work upon all of us is that it repurposes the work of poets like Mansour for its own ends and meaning. Kind of like how American English conveniently erases important etymologies, essentially whitewashing its own linguistic heritage. But language and meaning existed before colonizing languages like French and English….”

…Je suis l’argent
L’argent qui fait l’argent sans savoir pourquoi….

…I am money
Money that makes money without knowing why….

— from the poem “Je suis la nuit” by Joyce Mansour, trans. Emilie Moorehouse, Poetry, June 2023, p. 248

A final comment by Helal on Mansour: “I think what’s important to consider as you engage with Mansour’s work is to remember she isn’t some radical exception — a woman having escaped or defied gender and its imposed or cultural norms — but a woman who made a place to be her full self in these poems…. I want to avoid ascribing or imposing any kind of Eurocentric reading or categorization of Mansour’s work because, though she lived in France, she held so many cultures and lineages in her….”

More on Mansour: an essay about her by translator Emilie Moorehouse.

Summer reading: nature books for kids

Last week, I led some ecology programs in Maine with kids of various ages, including with the “Sand Diggers,” a group of children in preK-K. A few days before we drove up to Maine I checked the weather forecast. The National Weather Service was predicting rain most of the week, meaning we might be indoors much of the week. Uh oh. All my lesson plans for the Sand Diggers were for outdoors activities. I decided to get some nature storybooks to provide some indoors activities with the Sand Diggers.

I found a couple of good books at a nearby Mass Audubon sanctuary gift store. Our local bookstore didn’t really have any nature-themed picture books. So with the help of my librarian sister, I placed on online order for seven nature-themed picture books. Amazon was the only online bookseller who promised delivery in time for our trip to Maine; all I had to do was sign up for a month of free Prime “membership.” Of course, only one out of the books I ordered arrived before we left for Maine, typical of the poor customer service offered by Amazon. (Needless to say, I canceled my Prime “membership” before I had to actually start paying for that kind of poor service.)

Enough about Amazon, because this post is not about how horrible Amazon is. It’s a post about nine nature books for kids, all of which I think are pretty good. Capsule reviews of each book are below, with the best books saved for last.

The nine storybooks arranged on a table.
L-R, top row: I Can Name 50 Trees Today (the only book shipped on time by Amazon); The Lorax (shipped late by Amazon, but I got a free used copy from a Mass Audubon Little Free Library); Celia Planted a Garden (shipped late by Amazon); We Are Water Protectors (shipped late by Amazon); Light the Sky, Firefly (purchased from Mass Audubon).
L-R, bottom row: Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt (shipped late by Amazon); Over and Under the Pond (shipped late by Amazon); Hike (purchased from Maine Audubon); The Hike (shipped late by Amazon).
Amazon shipped just 1 out of 7 books on time. Thank goodness for Mass Audubon and Maine Audubon, so I had books to read to the Sand Diggers. Support your local booksellers!
Continue reading “Summer reading: nature books for kids”

Summer reading: books about bookstores

Climate change has changed summer reading. It used to be that you’d find a book to read while you sat in the sun on the beach. In this climate-changed world, now you might find a book to read while you sit inside hoping that your house doesn’t flood. So today, while rain pounded on the roof of our apartment, I finished reading two books about bookstores, and started reading another one.

(There are some spoilers below. If that bothers you, proceed no further.)

The three books sitting on a table.
L-R: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (found in a Little Free Library); Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (purchased from a local bookseller); Remainders of the Day (purchased from a local bookseller).
Friends don’t let friends buy from Amazon — support your local booksellers!
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Reading list: Search

Bev loaned me the book Search: A Novel (Penguin, 2022), by Michelle Huneven. Search is the story of a ministerial search committee in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in southern California during their year-long process to find someone to replace their retiring minister. Michelle Huneven actually served on a ministerial search committee, and the book is a fictionalized account of her experiences. Bev, who loaned me the book, is a long-time lay leader who has lived through six different ministerial searches in the past quarter century. She told me that I really need to read this book. So I did.

(Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal key elements of the book’s plot. Continue at your own risk.)

Photo of the book lying on a wood tabletop.
Continue reading “Reading list: Search”

Pee-on-earth Day is June 21!

It’s that time of year again — if you’re in the northern hemisphere, get ready to pee on the earth! June 21 is annual Pee-on-earth Day, a day to urinate outside.

By urinating outside, you don’t have to use water for flushing. As climate change gets weirder we’re going to have more droughts, so why waste drinking water to flush your pee? Besides, it’s fun to pee outdoors. At least, as long as no one can see you. And if someone can see you, just pee in a bottle and then spread your pee on some needy plant outdoors. Urine makes good high-nitrogen fertilizer, though you might want to dilute it first.

You can learn more about Pee-on-earth Day from its originator, Carol Steinfeld (she’s my spouse) here. She even wrote a book about it titled Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine To Grow Plants. If you want to order a copy, leave me a comment and I’ll try to get you a deal….

Asian American poetry webpage

Following up on Sunday’s post — I discovered that the Poetry Foundation has a great short essay on “Asian American Voices in Poetry,” with links to lots of poems by dozens of poets.

Thre are links to some stalwarts of the older generation of poets, including well-known figures like Maxine Hong Kingston. Among the older poets, I was pleased to see a link to some of Lawson Fusao Inada’s poetry. I used to have a book of his poetry which I quite liked but it must have disappeared in the last cross-country move. Reading his poetry again makes me want to get another of his books.

I enjoyed seeing a link to Indran Amirthanagayam’s poems. He’s almost exactly my age (an old guy), and I first saw him maybe forty years ago when he was the lyricist and lead singer of a punk rock band. Now he’s older, respectable, a U.S. diplomat — but his poems still have some of that punk rock energy.

I was also pleased to see links to younger poets like Chen Chen and Ocean Vuong. To my shame, I haven’t kept up with younger poets. It looks like this will be a good way to get introduced to some of the newer poets.

Asian American poetry books

It’s Asian American Pacific Islander Native Hawaiian heritage month, and to celebrate I’ve been reading poetry — mostly by Americans of East Asian and South Asian descent (I had to narrow things down a bit, so left off West Asia and all the Pacific Islands). I’ve also been dipping into some Asian poetry. Here are some comments on two books I’ve been looking into:

They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Poets

ed. Christine Kitano and Alycia Pirmohamed (Blue Oak Press, 2022) — I’m really enjoying this collection. No, I haven’t liked all the poems. But I have felt that even the ones I didn’t care for were worth reading. And there are some real gems in this book, like Mai Nguyen Do’s poem “Ca Dao,” which begins:

The rice field is the oldest concert hall.
I’ve sung for four thousand years
here: in my mother, my grandmother,
the mother goddess, God. I’m already dead
when I’m singing….

Do gives the feel of folk poetry, as you’d expect from the title (“ca dao” is a term for Vietnamese folk poetry). Yet the poem itself is very contemporary. The combination makes for a haunting and memorable poem.

I also liked Mary-Kim Arnold’s poem “Forgotten War” very much. At first, it might sound a little didactic in places, but the total effect is not at all didactic. Arnold takes us from scenes of the Korean War to a scene in a U.S. bar, and a few other places along the way. In the powerful last stanza, she says:

You can stay up all night counting corpses and still not know who you are.
You can open your mouth to speak but still not know your own name.

Overall, it’s a high quality collection with a wide range of contemporary poets, from a wide range of Asian backgrounds — West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Pacific Islands. Highly recommended.

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

Chen Chen (BOA Editions, 2022) — I liked Chen Chen’s first book of poems, and had high hopes for this new book. There some good poetry here, but the collection doesn’t have the energy and humor which marked the first book. And lines like this one made me lose interest: “I mean, is ‘shit,’ is ‘scat’ more or less literary than ‘poop’?” — that kind of line in the midst of a love poem just sounds academic and self-indulgent. Yet as I say, there’s some good poetry here. For example, I like the first stanza of “The School of Australia”:

Your emergency contact has called
to quit. Your back-up plan has backed
away. Your boyfriend has joined a boy band
named All Your Former Boyfriends….

The rest of the poem doesn’t live up to the promise of that first stanza. But it’s worth reading through this book to find little gems like that. And there’s no doubt that Chen Chen is a poetic talent worth watching. Worth reading.

The meaning of justice

From the novel Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei, a native Hong Konger. The novel is set in Hong Kong in the year 2014, and follows the adventures of Au Nga-Yee as she tries to find out why her sister Siu-Man committed suicide by jumping from the window of their apartment. Without spoiling things for you, I can safely tell you that the plot involves social media, the Dark Web, and the tech industry. Nga-Ye has to hire N, a hacker and a most unusual detective, to figure out what really happened to Siu-Man.

Late in the book, N, the detective, reflect on his motivations for continuing to work as a detective:

“The word he hated most in the world was ‘justice.’ Which wasn’t to say he didn’t know the difference between good and evil — but he understood that rather than simplistic morality, most conflict in the world arose from differences of opinion, with both sides raising the flag of justice and claiming to be on the side of reason. This allowed them to justify the most underhanded means as ‘a necessary evil’ to defeat the other side — the law of the jungle, essentially. N had a deep understanding of this. He had money, status, power, and talent, so he could do pretty much whatever he wanted and other people would see him as an avatar of ‘justice’ — but he knew that keeping others down in the name of justice is another form of bullying.” (Chan Ho-Kei, trans. Jeremy Tiang, Second Sister [2017; trans. Grove Atlantic, 2020])

While this passage merely represents one character in a murder mystery talking to himself, there is some truth in what this character says. It is all too easy to misuse the word “justice.”

Another book I need to read

I’ve long been skeptical of the philosophical concept of the “social contract.” It always sounded anachronistic to me. The social contract is supposed to go back to prehistory, but the whole notion of a “contract” is actually a modern Western notion.

But I never thought about who gets to participate in the social contract. Back in 1997, Charles W. Mills published “The Racial Contract” in which he takes on philosophers like Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant. Apparently, in that book he argues that the people who get to participate in the social contract are white people. And if white people are the only people who get to participate in the social contract, then people of other skins colors… well, maybe they aren’t really people, but sub-people.

Cornell just issued a 25th anniversary edition. I really should buy a copy and read it….