The Griffins are livestreamed.
P.S. And archived, at least for a while.

Ruminations riding madly off in all directions as I read Borges. In Utopia of a Tired Man, Jorge Luis Borges wrote,

The man laughed. “No one can read two thousand books. In the four centuries I have lived, I have’t read more than half a dozen. Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. Printing – which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness – was one of man’s worst evils.”

What story is necessary? What is extraneous in existence that we could skip it as redundant or unimportant?
What does this silence and stifle? Nonsense? Sidelined superior truths that don’t fit the girdle?
Do many voices prevent one dominant story from excluding most data and people? Or sum to more people being isolated and excluded? It de-concrentrates power to disperse story and allow less polished voices of less standard shapes, but isolates people from overlapping knowledge. Overlapping knowledge is part of peace. Monolithic story aids peace, until it meets another blindered story. Then is the collision summing to a bigger injury than all the death by thousands of cuts?
Gleaning for what abides. What is core? What is worth absorbing?
If all story is love/conflict or birth/death and the rest is details…what details figure in?
I could take any number of leaping points out of the quote.
The value of rereading is one I’m pondering generally. It’s a defensive ponder, partly due to the years of sporadic pokes of threat that I should get rid of books if I only read them once. I’m done with them and they should go back into the world. Use or lose. To justify keeping them, I feel my back against the wall to reread and prove their worth. The model seems wrong. B&W, prove use or proven hoarder. Many readers have thousands of books. I grew up around people who had rooms of books. Not sure how to resolve that difference in expectations. To next point on value of rereading.
A book is made with the writer and reader in concert. There has to be overlap and extension on each part. If they mapped up perfectly, one would be redundant. Who the book is likely is constant, second edition with changes, or new prefaces not included, what the reader knows and can grasp after intervals will be different. It may seem in part like a new work, same but different as if printed in color with the registration marks perhaps not lining up. It measures change of movement in the reader. This thought is nothing new, my usual whirligig, the relativity like what I was considering in 2005.
What’s the use of a second read? Can you get pleasure again? With a memory like mine I joke I can experience the same thing for the first time, over and over.
I load the brain and empty it for more like a dump truck. Repeating is to lodge and keep. There’s little I want to keep, much I want to keep access/option to.
Am I restricting myself to more of a superficial read if I don’t loop back? Is not paying attention the first time as good as looping back? I tend to get more of connections and implication in first glance than most seem to in a few passes. I tend to be less interested in repetition than most, which is why songs tend to drive me to distraction with repeated beat and choruses. It’s been said, move on! Next song. No depth, no complexity, no point.
What holds the depth of memory if not text. Placeholder objects. The shirt that is a copy of the one I wore one afternoon in Giant Tiger when I was 15. I can remember the sun, sounds, shape of space I was in. Seeing a vine-candydish is a rereading the face of grandma one Christmas and a much older memory of a summer afternoon at an elderly cousin where there was horehound candy. Associated readings of time first seeing a lathe, the smell of wood shavings and tung oil. These memories I can reread thru tactile. Would a more compelling portal to memory text be one routed thru braille I could read? Visual, rather than text, I also can re-read on a more frequent rate. I can look into a few paintings, a few visual poems often and the repeat is pleasure. Is it a obstacle at audio repetition and words are sound?
What does it come out of, this habit to not pore over the same books dozens of times, to make them a personal canon I can recite? The urge forward for opportunity cost, knowing that when one thing is repeated, something new is being displaced? But for each thing new, something old is also losing traction. From a belief that repetition is a sign of a lie rather than truth? Stories are a matter of ‘protesteth too much’ thus more a red herring than good to feast on.
My preoccupation with novel paints me not into the corner, but out door after door after. I want to push myself outward. Perhaps some is my fear of returning to the hostile narrow minded “Christian love of hating the sin but not the sinner” that I find contemptible in myself, how I caused myself and others pain. Challenging myself to read in different directions exercises me to stay flexible, prevents some hardening into narrow subset. I do not want to reinforce my own views, but trying to widen data set, counter directions, keep the range and to the middle so I can see farthest works against this. That restricts my seeing the range in walkabout, close up, to stay in the middle. Perhaps this not wanting to harden to a view is why people who agree with me and disagree with me both make me nervous. I’d rather get information without deciding it is this way or that or be told these imaginary sure right or wrongs. Things are. Foundational is the zen story of the farmer who gains 3 runaway horses. There’s no luck, good or bad, only changing context and attitude.
Not having the habit to loop back often perhaps is a product of what I’ve read in part, off-the-cuff, half-considered trinkets of words that don’t reflect on themselves. There’s nothing to unpack structurally in syntax or sound or ideas that the writer intended. It’s ill-trained me.
Some things reveal a considered work. Most are half-assed disposable thoughts. There’s no more benefit to studying them than spacing out in marvel at how two crumbs incidentally fell on the floor and cast long evening shadows.
At the breakfast talk at Book Expo America, Barbara Kingsolver pointed out in the livestreamed talk that in times of papyrus perhaps 1% of men could read now we have literacy of billions. She said the job of a writer is an unbroken lineage of finding universal truths with the same technique for an unchanged human brain, from the practice of ancient Iceland, Greece or Ireland. The argument suggests we can’t bore of stories if told well.
Something in there sits wrong somehow.
There’s nothing, surely, that reading does, that an oral society doesn’t preserve in different shapes. Literacy is not superiority. It is difference in routes. A proverb related in In the Orchard, the Swallows, more knowledge makes a wise man wiser and more knowledge makes the fool more foolish.
Education isn’t enough for wisdom. Literacy and education overlap but aren’t the same. Ample numbers of those with PhDs in my life with not a whit of compassion or sense past self show demonstrate against the education system. Having taught people who were text-illiterate but well-rounded thinking, critical citizens shows the little seriffed fonts are not magic pills. We have universal literacy and a national vision skewing towards war machine that came out of a culture that reads tens of thousands of magazines, books, newspapers. As she pointed out rural farmers are likely to be heavily hit by climate change but are those least likely to believe it is happening. How do two people see the same world and a different pattern and outcome?
She talked prettily, glossed over fears of the future of the book with the resistance that meets every change. It’s nothing new to e-books. She says as we left vellum, detractors must have scoffed, “this paper doesn’t do it for me. I have to feel the skin of a dead sheep for this [text] to work for me”. She was amusing even if dismissive. At the same time she raised by coincidence the same point of Borges, the value of timeless lessons in stories.
Do we want lessons? The non-linear, non-narrative, non-didactic aspects of poetry need lessons as a foil. It makes their humour, their defining edges to work against the insistence on producing meaningful. If I consume sound without sense for long enough, it becomes a salt diet that has me thirsting for the fig of meaning again.
The back and forth is a sort of repetition that can be pleasing.
You may disagree with some of what I said, but then, so do I.

The Ginko walk is literally a praise/poem making walkabout. For an hour or few people walk, looking at the world together, in small groups perceiving the spring afternoon or the moon or whatever the season and characteristics of the time and pre-chosen place. The nature of the practice is to have a relaxed social exercise, in the mental and physical sense of exercise.

Since Haiku Canada’s venue this time at York U was a aboretum in bloom, finding beauty wasn’t hard. A poem is another matter.
Haiku is a slow craft. Because it often has as a writing domain something with a strong emotional charge conditioned with the control of hindsight, it takes time to edit and prevents it from being meaningless verse.
There’s a balance of not being too blunt or expository, nor too oblique nor cliché while responding within the frame of what has been written where possible. There’s attention to sound and pace without falling to too painterly. Because there’s only a few phonemes, it’s easy as watercolor for things to get muddy. You might roll a poem over for a year or a decade, refining while trying to get closer to that sense of freshly made naturalness.
An advantage of the ginko walk practice is that it gives permission to write quickly.
Anything can only be only a failure if a timeline is imposed, which it is. Although you have your notes and drafts that can be developed into a poem later. I brainstormed 21 first drafts, 4 of which might have legs.
Without having permission to start more than you will finish, without permission to start, and permission to throw away and without a kickstart to begin those that might become something, how else are you going to get to the 10, 40 or 100 drafts it will take to be something worth reading?
The ginko poems made are shared fairly soon after. Having internalized a corpus of poems and being well-conditioned to write helps to create on the spur of the moment.
In Haiku Canada and Haiku North America meetings, you pick your best effort of the walk and drop it in box where it’s judged.

This year George Swede was the judge at Haiku Canada.
In his introductory remarks he talked about the Ginko, how it can put one into a state of quiet stress, the brain full of beta waves which are not the best for creativity. You want alpha waves to be in your creative comfort zone but here you are, wondering, am I lost? You are roaming in an unfamiliar place, and on a tight timeline. You want to reach for some aha of transcendence but what arrives may come in any stage of composition. You’re more likely to manage a preliminary sketch. Or perhaps some field notes. A rough poem, perhaps. This year two haiku from the walk stood out as more advanced, one by Ellen Cooper (?) and one by LeRoy Gorman.

Those will be published in a future issue, perhaps at Haiku Canada in Calgary, 2013.

Working last to first and first to last and in various orders in between, my irregular self-poll of what books or materials I’ve got open and am reading…
Faking Relaxation by Brynna Leslie is on p. 7 of May 31, 2012’s EMC is also in the online version. Her column is about trying out yoga. Here’s a taste,

Always the procrastinator, I was running late and it looked like rain, so I sprinted the 750 metres to the studio. I walked into the lobby panting and sweating.
It was painted soothing shades of green, with a little water feature. I took a deep breath and allowed my journalist’s eye to examine the studio.

I’ll have to watch for more by her.
Artifact by Frannie Linday at Linebreak is striking in being so streamlined and lucid yet embedding so much distance covered. It’s something of a bullet train of a poem. It starts in the middle of action,

1.
You came to put up with
the buxom peonies
Helga kept bringing.
First you asked them to stop
the prednisone, next the valium,

We know so much of the context and room, the smell, the social and medical context. She has 3 books out, one from Perugia Press in the U.S. called Lamb. These poems are not light, nor do they go somewhere unexpected, yet they have a glowing quality made possible perhaps only by the darkness of terrain she has chosen.
Michelle Desbarats characteristically walks the darker edge of things and yet she also blesses it with a generosity of glow, comic and a touch of surreal. With any luck we’ll get another collection by her in coming years to brighten the eyes.
The Touch of a Moth, edited by Claudia Coutu Radmore and Marco Fraticelli (Scrivener Press, 2012) includes past luminaries who, in some cases I know only by name, not face or poem. Both are included here, those who are part of living memory for others like Marianne Bluger, Ruby Spriggs, Jocelyne Villeneuve, and Shaunt Basmajian and ones I had the pleasure of meeting, like Bill Higginson.
Essays of remembrance flesh out the names I hear floating as does an 8-page history of haiku in Canada by Terry Ann Carter puts all the pieces in order of how it all fits together. 2 poems from each add it all up to 202 pages. I’ll pick my way thru it all eventually. Haiku and senryu tend to be deceptively dense poems that can add up to watching individual raindrops if you try to do too many in a sitting. (Which is tempting since a new issue of A Hundred Gourds is out.)
Here’s one of Jean Jorgensen from the Moth anthology, p. 115

he ties one hole
to another – fisherman
mending his nets

In the poem from her 1990 collection an opening paradox becomes concrete, clear. It tickles the brain to look at the negative spaces, spins a way of thinking of something.
The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges, (EP Dutton, 1971) is a short story collection was quoted in a podcast of Craig Mod and led me to finally read some of Borges.
In his short story, The Other, he remarks, (p. 16 in this version),

“Your mass of oppressed and alienated is no more than an abstraction,” I said. “Only individuals exist – if it can be said that anyone exists.”

Even the individual is something of a crowd of distinct individuals. The story is something like a Freedom 55 commercial, or rather, where that ad came from, with a 20-year-old meeting his 70-year-old self.

Half a century does not pass in vain. Beneath our conversation about people and random reading and our different tastes, I realized that we were unable to understand each other. We were too similar and too unalike. We were unable to take each other in which makes conversation difficult.

He describes in the intro how he tries to emulate “H.G. Wells in combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot.” They are easy stories to slip into, perhaps because they have changed the culture, having been absorbed into the culture banks and changing it to be like him.
I’m looking at Laura Carstensen’s talk on Older People are Happier. Our society is changing from pyramid of large numbers of youth and few elders to more of a box shape with healthier long living older people. Culturally we shift with aging and with demographic balance shifting, the overall culture will shift in some predictable way.
With the longevity people have, on average a more broad outlook, less tolerance for injustice, but paying more attention to happier things and less frazzled by unnecessary bullshit. The numbers and methods are fascinating in her talk. Illuminating even.
Flutter by Alice Burdick (Mansfield Press, 2008) is light in the comic sense. It is abrupt, with a rapid dry wit, cynical perhaps yet not disheartened in the maudlin sense. p. 22

The modulation of yesteryear
has been flattened, sorry.
So hostile takeovers
here and everywhere.
[…] May: even the dog wears a ribbon.
Suspended, joy shall be resumed.

A foresight of knowing one is in a trough of tough and the light will come back. It’s looking at human nature, like a foible-full species. We have habits we can predict. He’s a product of avoidance tricks. p. 41, “The meat leaves, slowly” ends with something like a koan but gets into this human habit of being inescapable from ourselves.

Have you seen the water boil?
It does so in it own waves.
Daughters of fisherman
fear the open seas
so mow the hills to roads.

Funny, in a tragi-comedy sense. We won’t make the mistakes of the fathers. To empty the sea of fish isn’t going to happen in the next generation (partly because they learned consequence, partly because the fish are gone). The next generation won’t repeat the heartache of people lost at sea, so turn the collective attention to the land, which they then plunder and crush. But it’s different, because it’s land and its for housing and practical infrastructure, not traditional way of life. As if, See? Different.
We make our paths, but tend not to lie in paths of trains. We are one of the maker-species, chronic nest-builders, compulsive migration-makers. We are in the bath of our boiling selves, rolling with each other so we have little vantage to stop and speculate on the large scale patterns we are within.
The poetry seems a sort of slow-pick for the fast clip of it. Dense and light simultaneously because it doesn’t dwell within the length of the line or poem, more over the whole criss-crossing similar ground.
Good News Bible (Harper Collins, 1994), The Deuterocanonical Books of Apocrypha. Tobias 5:4-6

Tobias then went out to look for someone who knew the way to Medina and would travel with him. Almost as soon as he left the house, he found himself face to face with Raphael. Tobias did not know that Rafael was an angel so asked him where he was from. “I am an Israelite,” Rafael answered, “one of your distant relatives and I have come here to Ninevah to find work.”

Interesting reply. Lying angels? Or true, in a manner of speaking, to the understanding in a world where god gave truth only to the Israelite true believers, a world where the only trusted tribe is one’s own and one must marry cousins so descendants of prophets keep marrying prophets, plus keep profit in the family.
I have a few variants of holy books. It’s curious how impulse finds similar shapes in cultures. It’s like convergent evolution whether Israel‘s weight of showing collarbone or elbow, much like the symbolic weight placed in Eastern Morocco where we were, like the fundamentalist Christian time and place I was were showing the knee was salacious invitation, or at worship with those who follow Bhagavad Gita with women modestly covered and separate from the men. Yet not the man’s body, their forearms or ankles never a come-on by existing. Must be the faulty wiring of humans, susceptibility to myth and confirmation bias and tribe.
In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs (Anansi, 2012) is a story from Pakistan of a man released from prison, p. 42

We woke, later, and watched the dawn arrive. The smudges of grey polished into colour. The sandy path to the village yellowing, and the houses emerging from their gloom, their dull mud bricks beginning to warm. The mountains materializing, immense against the skyline, clean-capped with ice, then furrowed and brown beneath the snowline. The cold air somehow lifting, as though the whole valley took in a breath and held it, silent for a moment.

What could I add to that? The slow reveal of attention to detail. I couldn’t bring back to mind waking in the night in Italy to see dawn arrive until that described. It isn’t so much seeing blue cast disappear as I would have thought of it. It is more to see the colors arrive as if they’d never been and suddenly are. Space seeming to enlarge in time-lapse as visibility distance spreads. An attentive capture of being in that time of day.
It lilts thru in iambic regularity, simple words, concrete images, plain language, nothing extraneous and self-referential to distract. No editorializing asides, no zealous elbow of wit yet not simple and not easily achieved.
Bleeding Light by Sheniz Janmohamed (Tsar, 2010) is a collection of rhymed ghazals with striking metaphors such as one of he who can drain blood from an opal (p. 13). They are often dramatic, almost theatrical yet fresh. I can’t say I’ve heard anyone else say as she did on p. 8,

“Hearing one refrain, of his suffering, her walls stiffen to ice. To melt is her only prayer.”

To have walls, to be made of ice, to melt are all common enough poetry fodder, but there’s an extra leap there when combined in that way and with “to melt is her only prayer”. It suggests a desire to be compassionate, malleable as liquid. To fervently wish to not react as one does, rather than the more usual reaction at that juncture to go on to a blame game of how the he should change, or elaborate on the off-loading of why oh-woe-is-me and war-is-he.
Nothing is lyrically explored in the ghazal the way it would be in a narrative lyric form and yet the glimpses are rich. For example, something of a parable in “A man sells packets of socks in a gully where most men walk barefoot/ […] If only we planted a thousand trees for each page we discard and crumple!” (p. 14)
Zócalo by Daphne Marlatt, (Coach House, 1977) goes at the speed of light, breathless as a fast freestyle guitar. p. 41-42 the motorcycle’s run thru the twisting unfamiliar roads comes to halt at the ocean,

[…] walk to the edge, rocks, to a thatched-roof hut below them, big bright sign, BE BE PEPSI, people sipping drinks, sitting (she is still weak-knees) & at their feet sea rushing on to sand, sea, an immense brilliant, risible & shining, splashing against the earth it seeks to reduce to flecks of laughter.

Rain; road; an open boat (M&S, 2012) by Roo Borson is curiously similar and dissimilar to have in the head at the same time. They both are travelogues, one to Mexico, the other to Japan, both exploring form, Borson with haibun and Marlatt with the prose poem run-on sentence. The Borson pieces flow one to another as one thought, although that thought is like sitting in reflection, watching what rises inwardly rather than the cataloguing the external flashes. p. 24,

The world in old photos,
or the world in spring –
which is younger?

p. 37 in “Dictionary” she writes,

The book itself is a code, a key, a lock, an implement that stands for an earlier time and other customs, containing only those things that need not exist, but do so nonetheless, carrying them forward as a maple seed is carried forward by the wind.

I admire this structure of sharing a thought to mull. Do we call it poem or prose or prose-poem? Or between genres or just listen? Ideas are power of creation. Once something is thought it can be brought into being in physical reality. Once there’s a word and acknowledgement of something in physical being, it can fall out of existence, moved past. It is a kind of cultural building to admit an idea that may become as large and deep and wide as a tree.
As Richardson points out, it works for rereading. The book itself is meditations on revisiting, or finally visiting places, on the scale of decades of wait. It is a patient book, watching beauty.
Papa: Our Fabulous Father by Linda Soward (Self-Published, 2011) tracks the story of her father from the time of his grandfather father (born 1798) as the story was passed generation to next. On p. 3-4 what was said of my great-great grandfather after he had walked between villages to propose, arriving with the red sky of evening of Monday, Feb 23, 1824,

The windows were trimmed with shutters, and on each side of the doorstep were wooden flower pots filled with green branches. This was the sign Elizabeth promised him. His heart beat wildly, and his his thoughts raced faster. So she was not married, or had she just been married and had forgotten to remove the branches?

Since that family and he had come over in the same boat from Ireland the previous summer, he had not seen them. He stayed with the family and there 3 daughters for supper, after months of baching it and building a cabin for his wife, the company and fireplace and cooking was welcome.

Conversation came easily, except each time John tried to broach the subject of asking Elizabeth to be his wife. He told himself the right moment had not arrived, but the night was fleeting. Suddenly the clock on the mantle struck ten o’clock. Mr. Ireton turned and looked at his three daughters, and then at John, “Which one will you have?” he asked John curtly. The question came as such a surprise the astonished John could not remember her name.
“I’ll have the little one in the corner, if you please, sir,” he stammered meekly, nodding towards Elizabeth. “Very well then,” answered Mr. Ireton. “It is now time to retire. We will make the arrangements in the morning.”
The following day, Feb 24, 1824, the young couple were married at Carleton Place. Elizabeth, age 26, walked with John to her new home in Lanark County. Elizabeth never returned to her parents home. Such were the lives of pioneers.”

Amazing to think there are family photos, records, stories passed down from generations. If we relied on oral alone, I’d have never have known.
The Real Made Up by Stephen Brockwell used transcribed speech of the valley, Eastern Ontario/Eastern Townships of Western Quebec, a few generations on. p. 23, Bill McGillivray’s Trophy Deer (p. 23-26) and other poems in that series stand out to me as illuminating about what can be said and a certain eureka of understanding these boys I grew up among. The scoff of city folks being afraid to kill a spider, the doubling back to Canadian self-deprecating, quaking in his own boots as he and his brother went deer hunting. “I didn’t have the courage/not to watch/them dress it.” That dual pull reminds me of one of my cousins.
In “Bill McGillivray’s Antique Rifle” (p. 62-63) Bill muses on the rifle he inherited and what it could have meant and been or where it came from. It was a keepsake from his dad stripped of its full weight of memory because,

He’d never talk
about it. None of them did.
People say they were
afraid to share
their feelings. That’s
not it. They just didn’t feel
a thing by the time
they had time to talk.

I wonder if that’s not it. That procrastination, waiting for time to share to open up and suddenly a deathbed and years of stories never fully worked out enough to share. Never the right time, moment, person. Deferring in a life two blinks long. Realizing too late that memories erode and synching up your stories against another, how do you reconstruct something plausible of how it was. Like how the poems grab a bit of verbatim, In “Mark Bradley’s Truck”, p. 66

have look at her.
She has a big block
V10 with 500
horses ready to
rip a rubber mile
down the 407. And
talk about towing.
She’d tow the
Titanic from the ocean.

Just the brag of bravado of a guy for his truck. Any number of neighbours with steel toe boots and belt buckles for show that each he persists in wearing despite decades of razzing. People like the guys. They can tell a pretty good tale and you might even want to believe half it.
Poems either silence you or knock something loose to tell. Silence is good. “Silence is Karikura’s favourite affirmation.” (p. 60). I’d just as rather have something knocked loose.
The McGillivray poems remind me of being in school, grade 9, and 11 years into the system including pre-school and first seeing something I recognize in the classroom. A map of places that matched places I knew. I thought it was taboo. We weren’t even allowed to count like our parents, but to use metric instead. Instead of an alphabet of African and South American animals, comprehension question readings of hunts and ghosts in the U.S., battles of generals in England, and nothing on farming or local animals, except for that one time. Someone was brought in to talk about dairy farming from the Milk Marketing Board. She was a blushing college girl who carefully enunciated every word from paper script, including “teats” and caused titters from the back. Cows have tits. She explained how cows are milked to the group of grade 7 students who’d already been watching or doing the milking on the farm since they were just past the height of a gum boot.
And yet, it’s not just institutions that marginalize actual lived experience. Poetry is given to doing it too. Too many poems of lake vacations skipping over the daily. Death and ache and what about the muddles in betweem?
Like the haiku that use season words because that it what haiku does, rather than what the cultural weight or lived experience demands.
Poets sometimes picks subjects that skip over people, for privacy sometimes or sometimes to make it “poetic” or “in language”. To loop back to Borges, where are the spirits of particular individuals? Instead of painting a particular daisy in a particular moment, we settle for the word flower, or a list poem of species and adjectives to confer the idea of a field in an attempt to do it new, or do it transcendently, or avoid transcendent. In any case it can elbow out of the way what’s real or what feels important to say. What gesture within needs an outward expression? How to gesture it well enough that another can make it out? One of my favorite poem’s is p. 12’s Karikura’s Gives Advice, which I’d both hate to excerpt or to include in entirely. It’s worth the cover price itself.
Brockwell is giving a 3-hour workshop July 7 at the Ottawa Public Library with the focus to “help poets invest more verbal energy into their poems.”

In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs (Anansi, 2012) is billed as a novel not as poetry but rarely is poetry that poetic.
Which flies in the face of widening the idea of poetry to admit more range. Poetry can be communication, refusal to communicate, a leaping art, a clever clever to truth, an object without use held with emblemic or artefact weight, can be purged of conventional syntax and words so long as it works.
Yet here is this text, dead-center of contemplative, reflection, luminous beauty, admitting pain and loss. It is perfect candidate for poet’s voice taking itself preacherly and it doesn’t. It is its own thing. There’s a character with a desire for finding reconciling and compassion and accepting limits and striving. He doesn’t veer from nasty parts of life nor does he showcase them. There’s an inhalation of quiet. You look thru his peephole of what he knows and what gets revealed. Not predictable, not random nor uneven.
Each sentence is written with care, woven into a whole. Call it a novel call it poetry.
The real conundrum is could I pull off financially, socially, effectively, buying a box of the books, even to give away like Gideon Bibles to ensure more eyes read it? It’s interesting that I’d want to. What book have I ever read that I felt was both beautiful, useful and well-done that I could unequivocally back as adding good to the world? It must have happened before, surely, but right now, I can only see this.
And yet I wouldn’t want to oversell it, cause disappointment. It is not a jubilant adrenaline book. It has a muted detachment, the careful picking away one days as one rebuilds strength tentatively, figuring out what one is capable of doing. It is taciturn in a way. It says no more than it needs to. It ends in a logical place that I hadn’t anticipated yet feels right. It makes regular neutral speech seem brash and awkward. There’s a moral sensibility of a philosopher not a theologian. It is the story told as by man imprisoned and released in Pakistan, learning to figure out his story.