Motley Kamuka

Just watched the first show of Dickinson . There are 20 episodes.  I happen to be reading her poems. I like "Imps in eager caucus/ Raffle for my soul." In the first episode, she's spurning marriage, she gets published, she makes out with  Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson , and her father falls asleep in her bed.  I don't know who Hailee Steinfeld  is. She was in that terrible version of Ender's Game. She seems good as Emily.  Ella Hunt is Sue Gilbert, who writes poetry too. I love  Jane Krakowski . Hard to imagine her in that time, but they play music that is anachronistic and other things. The guests like Thoreau and LM Alcott are played as exaggerations of perhaps their smallness. It's only Olmstead that seems helpful, even if he's odd. Alcott is in it only for the money, and likes to hike up her dress and run across fields. I have a friend in the art world, ex-friend if you want to be exact, he slept with my ex-wife and has avoided me. Anyway, one ti...

I tried to watch Hunger Games after reading the book, and I was quite disappointed, the impressionistic visual drama doesn't convey the emotion and the depth of the story the novel does. I know that's a cliche. I've thought about reading Outlander, but Netflix has been pushing it on me for a long time. Of course I was glad to see Caitriona Balfe's beautiful body at age 33, when she claims to be 27 in the show, but my housemate is getting rid of Netflix and I have no money, so I'm not going to be able to watch it all in the next two days. There are 5 seasons and a 6th in production. I'll read the books for free at my library. But I must say that Caitriona Balfe is very beautiful and I'd probably turn gay for Sam Heughan if he wanted me (So improbable as to be impossible). I'll report back if I read the books. Links Meaning of Sassenach  (Town and Country) Wikipedia Caitriona Balfe (Wikipedia)

Station Eleven by  Emily St. John Mandel  is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the near future in a world ravaged by the effects of a virus and follows a troupe of Shakespearian actors who travel from town to town around the Great Lakes region. I read Salvation City recently and The Plague by Camus long ago and can't remember. I've read a fair amount of post-apocalypse sci-fi, pulse waves, nuclear war. They dropped a bomb on district 13 in Hunger Games. I love Shakespeare , read through all the plays and poems recently. To pair pandemic with Shakespearean troupe is cool as an idea to me. The execution reminds me a little of The Road and some of Octavia Butler's novels. Also there quite a few flashbacks to before the apocalypse. While there's rehearsing of lines from the play, I guess I'm less of a quote lover, and more of the whole gestalt of the plays. Anyway, cool presmis.  I'm taking effexor and I don't think I would kill myself the way the person does....

In college I was assigned The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker and was absolutely bewitched. I have read a lot of death literature, death memoirs, How We Die, and A Year of Magical Thinking. One book about a book club with his dying mother. A poet dying, where she says cute things I identify with, and the one by a doctor, that made me cry reading the epilogue by the wife. Sigrid Nunez has a novel about death, from earth dying, to an elderly neighbor, to being a kind of death doula to her friend.  I'm feeling more emotionally fragile with the breakup of my marriage, and the stress of quarantine, but I'm reading through Nunez and my library made the book available so I started reading it. I didn't even get halfway in the 2 weeks, but it came around again and I'm going to finish it now that I've identified my resistance to reading it. What Are You Going Through is the usual clear smooth literate narrative by Nunez. On Netflix it would be called "Slow Burn"....

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839 – 1908) was a Brazilian writer.  The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas  came out in 1881 and seems to be in the middle of his output.  The fantastical and intense writing reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, without the social awareness. This New Yorker article asks why he isn't read more: Writes Benjamin Moser "Since no one can graduate from high school without feigning knowledge of his work, many people read him far too young, and come to view him as a child might regard an improving vegetable."  And, "This might be one reason that Machado never really caught on abroad. He was not interested in national folklore, and described a milieu not too distant from that of Henry James or Edith Wharton." Race is treated differently in Brazil, where everyone seems to be mixed. This NY Times article discuss a new edit of a photo of him looking black. Links Tartuffe : Assis uses as a verb "tartufo" and other derivations.

I'm reading Catching Fire now, and continue to ruminate on Suzanne Collins' choices. How is this dystopia like and dislike from our society. The fence around nature. I guess I'm in America that has a lot of public parks, but I feel like you can't put a fence around all of nature, and I guess that's the point.  Katniss (named after a tuber you can eat) is a reserved woman who is a shrewd hunter. She is guarded, protective, caring for others. She marshalls her resources, is strategic. She imagines that a romance story will save the life of Peeta and draw the most support in the game of life and death where patronage can be the difference between life and death. So now she is trapped in this lie, and needs to perpetuate it.  This is how teens feel, to play the game of life. Really all humans. Does society need this blood sport, the blood letting, to curb the rebellious spirit? You'll have to answer that question yourself. North America is split up into districts. ...

 

Carlos Baker writes in Emerson Among The Eccentric , "the most rigorous judgement would have singled out five poems."(p.466): Days Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. Two Rivers Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain; But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through the Concord Plain. Thou in thy narrow banks art pent: The stream I love unbounded goes Through flood and sea and firmament; Through light, through life, it forward flows. I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the steam Through years, through men, through N...

 To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes, and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.

She was born Isabella Baumfree (1797–1883) and Dutch was her first language, and she was born 95 north of NYC in upstate NY. She was owned by 4 separate slave owners. She fell in love with a slave on a neighboring farm, but was not allowed to be with him, but eventually married and had 5 children. Her owner promised to free her if she was a good slave, and then didn't. She escaped in 1826, taking only an infant and leaving other children behind. Her children were sold in the south, illegally. She went to court and won the right to have him back, a monumental case. She traveled speaking about abolition and joined a Christian religious cult that thought Jesus was coming back. When he didn't arrive, she distanced herself from the cult. She also worked as a housekeeper. She dictated her story to Olive Gilbert and in 1850 William Lloyd Garrison privately published her memoirs in 1854, the year Walden came out. She had a speech entitled " Ain't I A Woman? ". Links: Soj...

Looking into planning the Romantics in 2022 I'm torn between 2 months each on Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly and Keats, and a more expansive one that ends with novels. Potential Reading List Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract William Blake (1757-1827),  William Wordsworth (1770-1850),  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834),  Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) Mary Alcock (c. 1742-1798) George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824),  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) John Keats (1795-1821) Mary Robinson (1758-1800) Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) Mary Shelly Frankenstein Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre Guiding Links: The Romantics by Stephanie Forward Legacy Intro to British Romanticism  List of Romantic poets:  William Blake William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lord Byron (George Gordon) Percy Bysshe Shelley John Keats John Clare Leigh Hunt Mary Robinson Robert Southey Sir Walter Scott Anna Læti...

Victoria Chang has written a poetry book on grief called Obit. It's a sad grind, but also beautiful.  Links Poets.com about INTERROGATING GRIEF : A CONVERSTION WITH VICTORIA CHANG (The Rumpus) Obsessive Obituaries --Interview (Neon Pajamas)

 "...There has sprung up in Boston a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental...I pursued the inquiry still further and found that Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful...there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism was its occasional vagaries (what school has not?) but it has good, healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore, if I were a Bostonian I think I would be a Transcendentalist." -Charles Dickens, "American Notes for General Circulation...

Ralph Waldo Emerson  (1803–1882) is at the center of this posthumous book that only lacked an introduction and an epilogue written by Princeton professor Carlos Baker . The Transcendental 2021 group recommended the book. I find it amazing that Emerson opened up his first wife's casket after 13 months of her being buried. He doesn't say why he did it, or his impressions after he did it. What an odd thing to do. I'm not saying it might not have been instructive or useful or therapeutic. It must have been shocking a little. Two of Emerson's working brothers were sickly, kept needing to get away from tubercular north east of America, and another brother was retarded and needed monitoring. Emerson wasn't feeling the orthodoxy of his church. He did not find the eucharist, the eating and remembering Jesus to be something you're supposed to do, he just thought the disciples were meant to do it that one time. He had other qualms, and got himself sick with worrying about ...

 What to read? There are so many things I could follow up on with the Margaret Fuller biography : Goethe, Shelly, Wordsworth, and other romantics. Or the last poets she hung out with before she left for America, and eventually died off the shores of Fire Island: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Or the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz . Or Waldo Emerson and Thoreau's poetry? Or the anti-Transcendentalist Edgar Allen Poe . Or some of the lesser transcendentalist poets or the Fireside poets? I could totally go off on a huge poetry tangent.  Or do I read history about the founding of Roman Republic in 1949, and wonder what Fuller's book would have been like? Or do I read the feminist that come out of the Seneca Falls Women's Rights conference, which she might have headlined in 1850? I'm probably going to read Nature by Emerson because that's where the group went. The cool thing about reading the Transcendentalists is that everything is available at gutenberg....

He was anti-trascendentalist: Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism[93] which Poe strongly disliked.[94] He referred to followers of the transcendental movement as "Frog-Pondians", after the pond on Boston Common, and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor—run mad,"[97] lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake".[94] Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them"." A little biography. He was orphaned early. He was adopted, though not formally. He married his 13 year old cousin when he was 27. She died 11 years later of tuberculosis. Poe died at 40. He is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. Poe's death a...

Ralph Waldo Emerson is at the heart of the Transcendentalist. He funded Thoreau, encouraged Fuller, and invited all his friends to come to Concord and visit and live. His rejection of the party line in theology led to his banishment and fame. Links Self Reliance (Wikipedia) Self Reliance on Librivox Biography (ThoughtCo) Wikipedia