Narrow Road to the Interior (Shambala, 1991) of Matsuo Basho’s trip about northern Japan in 1689. Sam Hamill’s forward says that over the 4 years it took Basho to polish his travelogue of the trip we took with his friend, some things shifted to more figurative than the literal walkabout. Like the tight zoom on details of the farmer saying there are too many intersecting roads, best to take his horse, which they did. “Arriving at a village, I tied a small gift to the saddle and the horse turned back.” Better than taxis, hands-down.
We’re pecking away at Guy Thatcher’s A Journey of Days: Relearning Life’s Lessons on the Camino de Santiago (GPHB, 2008). I like its historical footnotes and direct quotes of people who have walked Spain’s Camino over the last couple millennia. Unlike others who walked for a month or so, he goes with a convivial why-not attitude. Unlike those who have travelled it historically, he is neither pilgrim nor thief. I’m curious to see if he’ll fall in with either…In any case it doesn’t sound like a glamour trip. Its play-by-play feels like going there vicariously. And since options for anything we would eat seem quite limited and its become so popular to be ecological runoff of people, maybe doing it thru the page is the best way.
I suppose that it’s fitting that I get to 2007’s light summer read only now since it’s called Fashionably Late. Nadine Dajani’s novel (subtitled, “what happens in Cuba, stays in Cuba”) had me from the moment she described the smitten on sight as becoming a sudden Snuffleupagus. Is that not perfect? Swaying, ungainly, no one would believe you exist like this here, instantly a child and yet feeling huge and conspicuous. It’s basically college teenagers barhopping and squealing yet she tells it in such an appealing way. It’s bouncy.
Sean Stanley’s deliberate nonsense of Etcetera and Otherwise is hard to describe. It is nonsensical, like if Edward Lear had sex scenes (ending with “We redressed ourselves, and then put our clothes back on”, p. 35). The grammar and world regularly upends on a tiltawhirl – “as he spoke he fiddled with his dagger, only to discover the blade could be turned inside out, which released a cloud of mayflies he’d never known were there.” (p.53) I wonder when/if there’ll be post modern breaking the 4th wall addresses. It’s ruthlessly playful, puns and spouts of versey rhyme of the two travelling journeys impossible to conventional ways of thinking. Tightrope Books has published a very strange little work indeed, but glad they did. It’s goodly bizarre.
In the wings of the desk are the Pocket World in Figures: 2007, Persimmon Moons (Imago Press, 1998) by Marshall Hryciuk, Ursula Le Guin’s the wave in the mind (Shambala, 2004), American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, Norton 2009), Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros, (Vintage contemporaries, 1994), Open Letter, spring 2009, bpNichol + 21 issue, and Canadian Poetry: Volume One (Edited by Jack David and Robert Lecker, 1982 NewPress)