New tsundoku pile!

Hubby, Daughter, and I checked out the Big Bad Wolf book sale and came home with these titles.


~~~

No matter how strange or horrific the subject matter, a masterfully written story is always a pleasure to read. This one by T. Kingfisher is simply magnificent.

Many thanks to +Corinna Nuqui for sharing this.

The Nicaraguan poet Claribel Alegria has died at 93. She wrote more than 40 works of poetry and fiction as well as historical testimonies of the political violence that wracked her home countries of El Salvador and Nicaragua for years. "In Latin America a writer can’t live in an ivory tower,” she told the Economist in 1991. “Reality marks you. You can’t shut yourself away.”

More about her here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/claribel-alegria-central-american-poet-who-wrote-of-personal-and-political-anguish-dies-at-93/2018/01/31/ae4708ec-0698-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.d9cb9fb5c2a1


Mortally Wounded

When I woke up
this morning
I knew you were
mortally wounded
that I was too
that our days were numbered
our nights
that someone had counted them
without letting us know
that more than ever
I had to love you
you had to love me.
I inhaled your fragrance
I watched you sleeping
I ran the tips of my fingers
over your skin
remembered the friends
whose quota was filled
and are on the other side:
the one who died
a natural death
the one who fell in combat
the one they tortured
in jail
who kicked aside his death.
I brushed your warmth
with my lips:
mortally wounded
my love
perhaps tomorrow
and I loved you more than ever
and you loved me as well.

---Claribel Alegria
translated by Darwin J. Flakoll

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin is a fable for our time. Do take time to read it.

*"What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right
kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial."*

https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf

TWO CATS


It's better to be a cat than to be a human.
Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty—
their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is
only a cat's way

of getting without fuss from one place to another—
but because they see things as they are. Cats never mistake a
saucer of milk for a declaration of passion
or the crook of your knees for

a permanent address. Observing two cats on a sunporch,
you might think of them as a pair of Florentine bravoes
awaiting through slitted eyes the least lapse of attention—
then slash! the stiletto

or alternately as a long-married couple, who hardly
notice each other but find it somehow a comfort
sharing the couch, the evening news, the cocoa.
Both these ideas

are wrong. Two cats together are like two strangers
cast up by different storms on the same desert island
who manage to guard, despite the utter absence
of privacy, chocolate,

useful domestic articles, reading material,
their separate solitudes. They would not dream of
telling each other their dreams, or the plots of old movies,
or inventing a bookful

of coconut recipes. Where we would long ago have
frantically shredded our underwear into signal
flags and be dancing obscenely about on the shore in
a desperate frenzy,

they merely shift on their haunches, calm as two stoics
weighing the probable odds of the soul's immortality,
as if to say, if a ship should happen along we'll
be rescued. If not, not.

---Katha Pollitt


~~~

"All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone....I remember van Gogh's room in Arles, just as sheltering and austere, but with its beautiful geometry already twisted by anguish, the room that opened onto a landscape as meridional as the Vega of Granada and that contained only the bare necessities of life, yet it too, failed to save the man who took refuge there from horror." -- Antonio Munoz Molina, Sepharad


~~~
Vincent's Bedroom in Arles

ARCHAEOLOGY
by Katha Pollitt


"Our real poems are already in us, and all we can do is dig."
-Jonathan Galassi



You knew the odds on failure from the start
that morning you first saw or thought you saw,
beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country
the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one
you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap
of a poor Near Eastern backwater:
a few chipped beads,
splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets
whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered,
would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists.
Still, the train moved away from the station without you.



How many lives ago
was that? How many choices?
Now that you've got your bushelful of shards
do you say, give me back my years
or wrap yourself in the distant
glitter of desert stars,
telling yourself it was foolish after all
to have dreamed of uncovering
some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god?
Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom
flatten the digging site. Now come
the passionate midnights in the museum basement
when out of that random rubble you'll invent
the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices,
streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells
to which, in the blue of evening, one by one
come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.

~~~

Happy 2018 to all Bookaholics! May your writing and reading sustain you through the challenges of the new year.