I got sleepy on lunch break and sat in the sun. Everything was quiet and all the cups and bowls around me started to look like Velázquez cups and bowls.
The Roof Rat Review
- Gerald Murnane. Inland. (1989). A lovely X-ray of provincial childhood, wrapped in metafictional padding to which I was often indifferent but that sometimes carried off the magic trick as intended.
- Anna Burns. Milkman. Faber & Faber, 2018. An awful delight.
- Arakida Moritake, Steven D. Carter (trans). Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford University Press, 1993 (1991). Meticulously done. Reading in concert with a literary history like Keene's is a good way to avoid the false sense of sameness that comes with the heft.
- Donald Keene. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era - 1600-1867 (A History of Japanese Literature - Volume 2). Columbia University Press, 1999 (World Within Walls, 1976). Literary history through a reflecting telescope: genres cohere and then hollow out, what moves are possible when.
- [more...]
What goes on