Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

A brilliant poem, John. She also has a new poem in the September 9, 2021 issue of the London Review of Books titled "Ghazal of the Fiftieth Danaid." Unfortunately, it's too long for me to reproduce.

John, on Scribd find the newest AMERICAN SCHOLAR issue (under magazines and periodicals). A.EA. Stallings has an excellent essay comparing the influence of Byron and Shelley on Greek literature. The title of the article is appropriately, "At the Corner of Byron and Shelley."

As we get older, our appointments get to be increasingly appointments with doctors. The oncologist yesterday for my wife ... the dermatologist today for both my wife and myself. And all was good.

John wrote: "I went to the eye doctor yesterday for a follow up visit, as I was diagnosed previously with cataracts. Not severe, but an eventual issue. When I was there, they found a retinal tear developing in ..."
John,

I'm glad that you went to the eye doctor. The cataracts can wait. That retinal tear needs treatment. And I hope that the treatment is totally successful!

Carol,

I also think I have a feel for the deep meditation that is evoked by the poem.

The explanation by Hinton confirms that.

"The title sets the stage for this poem: Tu Fu wandering out into the land of dragon. It is a paradox central to Taoist/Ch’an practice: the more you struggle toward awakened dwelling—consciousness integral to dragon’s generative tissue, as the dragon awakened to itself—the more you isolate yourself as a thinking center of identity separate from that tissue, and the more you project that awakening out into some future time and place. In “Gazing at the Sacred Peak,” we would expect realization to come after a long arduous climb, on the summit of Exalt Mountain with its open distances and inspiring views, but Tu Fu finds realization by not climbing the mountain. And it’s the same here, in this roughly contemporaneous poem: rather than arduous practice in a monastery, he finds realization by turning away from realization—by leaving the monastery, wandering among ancestral dragon-lands, sleeping, waking."

Hinton, David. Awakened Cosmos (p. 12). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

Carol, another quotation from Kenneth Rexroth's Classics Revisited:

“Tu Fu is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a ma¬ jority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language. ... No other great poet is as completely secular as Tu Fu. He comes from a more mature, saner culture than Homer, and it is not even necessary for him to say that the gods, the abstractions from the forces of nature and the passions of men, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel and that only the steadfastness of human loyalty, magnanimity, compassion redeem the nightbound world. For Tu Fu, the realm of being and value is not bifurcated. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are not an Absolute, set over against an inchoate reality that always struggles, unsuccessfully, to approximate the pure value of the absolute. Reality is dense, all one being. Values are the way we see things. This is the essence of the Chinese world view, and it overrides even the most ethereal Buddhist philosophizing and distinguishes it from its Indian sources. There is nothing that is absolutely omnipotent, but there is nothing that is purely contingent either."

I enjoyed the poem a lot .. .and then I enjoyed Carol's explanation just as much.

John, few poems have disturbed me more than this one by Yeats … ever since I read it about 55 years ago for the first time. And that’s good. Great poetry moves us, and sometimes just grabs us by the throat.

Carol wrote: "I also learned Latin at school. I really enjoyed it, although have never really agreed with the idea of learning a dead language, even one that is so important to our history in so many ways. Grandson now is learning it at his secondary school (high school?) in Belgium. He is a very reluctant Latin scholar and I was trying to help him on Skype with learning words which I hadn't seen for over 50 years. Had to admit defeat as he refused to email anything to me and I was forced to guess words which I had not seen for so long, from a teenager generally eating something, looking away from the camera and muttering them in French. Financial bribery has now been employed and his 9 year-old sister has stepped in, even although she doesn't know any Latin. Somehow, I don't think he will ever be reading the Aeneid. Very strangely, granddaughter refuses to learn English whilst her brother is relatively fluent..."

Carol, I'm not sure that any of this will help with your grandson, but there are two wonderful books about Latin. The first is Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler and the second is Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language by Nicola Gardini. Of the two, I slightly prefer the first one.

I took four years of Latin in high school. For Latin 3/4, one year it would be Cicero and the next year it would be the Aeneid and other Latin poetry. When I took the second year, it was the Aeneid and I was the only senior in the class. I never regretted taking four years of Latin, but one of the reasons had little to do with the language. The teacher (who I had for Latin 2,3, and 4) was the best teacher for simply teaching students how to work in their studies.

Anyway, children can be difficult ... the smarter ones often more so than others. I empathize with you.

We have a lot of crows. Their population in area was decimated by the Nile virus a yew years ago, but they have made a comeback. My wife really disliked them until this year when we had a baby crow in the backyard for a number of days.

Sher & John,

I am doing an EdX course myself ...it's Justice by Michael Sandel.

Here's a story about returning to the classroom after a lot of real world experience. I had a friend (call her Deb) who was Minister-Counselor for Agricultural Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. That made her responsible for a lot of aspects of U.S./EU agricultural trade and gave her a ton of experience in resolving a a lot of trade policy issues and disputes. After she returned to Washington, DC, she became director of multilateral affairs for the Foreign Agricultural Service, thereby picking up more experience with OECD and the WTO. And that was when she decided to return to school and get a degree (a second Masters degree) in Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. In her first course, whenever she tried to share any of her real-world experiences, the professor made her feel like she really had nothing to share that was worthwhile. Deb said that it was obvious that the professor felt terribly threatened ... and based on years of knowing Deb, I think she was probably correct. Deb dropped the class. That's a sad situation, where a professor is unable to work that kind of expertise into a course. (I might add that that program at GMU is a pretty good program ...I have a nephew who finished it and did get his Masters in Conflict Resolution.)

My own experience in returning to school was much better. I took Japanese at George Washington University. I won't go into the details ... but at the end of the year, the two professors who jointly taught the course took me out to a Japanese restaurant for lunch.

Right now in these days of Covid-19, I much prefer an online course to a classroom experience ... even if it means I'm not likely to get a free lunch.

Sher wrote: "By the way just started Garrion Keillor's Good Poems, and it is terrific so far about 6 poems in-- listening on Audible... I am filling my ears with poetry these days -- just finished an audible collection of John Keats that I very much enjoyed...."

That Keillor book is a brilliant selection of poetry ... from the 23rd Psalm to the Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry. I do like the way that he thematically groups his choices.

John wrote: "If we pursue a poetic handbook reading, I can suggest Shira Wolosky’s The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem.

I have read a lot of it, but not enough where I could write a review. It..."


John,

I looked at that one .... another good choice.

Sher wrote: "Larry:
Have you seen this one
Poetry as Survival looks excellent

and I also ordered a copy of Fundamentals of the Art of Poetry. This one looks fantastic - the approa..."

Sher, I have the Oscar Mandel book. It is brilliant, but dense ... that's not really a problem ... it just means that it repays slow reading. I don't have Poetry as Survival, but I do have Orr's A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry and like it a lot. I would be happy to read any of these three books with you, John, and Carol.

Carol wrote: "Larry wrote: "Carol wrote: "Historians are still arguing about whether the French were right to abandon the Americans on Rhode Island in the War of Independence because their fleet had been severel..."

Carol, I didn't know that at all. I suppose I would have learned that if I had read In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. I still plan to do that.

Carol wrote: "When the comte de Grasse met Washington for the first time on board his flagship in the Chesapeake, he embraced him and called him "Mon cher petit general" much to the amusement of Washington's staff, but not so much to Washington, who, however, was very relieved to finally see de Grasse and his fleet. Washington was tall, but de Grasse was taller and also larger...."


We're all ignorant of so many things ... but Americans seem especially ignorant of crucial parts of their history. I do think that there has been a dumbing down that can be attributed to just too much television and video that crowds out reading.

Carol wrote: "Perlego sounds extremely interesting. Had never heard of it. Had also never heard of Scribd, MUBI and Curiosity Stream. Am so pleased I live with present -day technology. It brings such richness to our lives. I would never want to return to previous centuries where lives were generally short and rather ghastly and for women often resulted in an early death from childbirth.."

We live in an age of digital richness. Just in terms of books, we I was young (I'm 72 years old now), I often just wanted something good to read. As I got older, I wanted something BETTER to read, but I still just usually read what I had on hand. Now I want to read exactly what I want to read. I'll start with the library, then move on to Scribd or Perlego, and then buy it if I must ... but I don't want to waste time on anything except exactly what I want to read. But determining what that is can still be a challenge. Book reviews and recommendations from friends are important .. so is having read one book by an author that made a great impression. You mention Robert Harris ... I really like what he has written, so he's an author that I would choose for my next book. I haven't read his Cicero trilogy, but I have heard great things about it. On the subject of Rome, I am slowly working my way through The Beginnings of Rome: Italy from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars by Tim Cornell. It's akin to SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard, but spends even more time on the earliest of Roman history and the historiography of the founding and the early years of the Republic.

Carol wrote: "Historians are still arguing about whether the French were right to abandon the Americans on Rhode Island in the War of Independence because their fleet had been severely damaged in a storm when th..."

"A few weeks after that, a storm off the coast of southern New England prevented d’Estaing from engaging the British in a naval battle that promised to be a glorious victory for France. Since then, a botched amphibious assault at Savannah, Georgia, had marked the only other significant action on the part of the French navy, a portion of which now lay frustratingly dormant at Newport at the southern end of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. By the fall of 1780, amid the aftershocks of devastating defeats at Charleston and Camden in South Carolina and Benedict Arnold’s treasonous attempt to surrender the fortress at West Point to the enemy, Washington had come to wonder whether the ships of his salvation would ever appear."

Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Hurricane's Eye (The American Revolution Series) (p. xii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. "

And then the French fleet came south in all its glory. Most Americans don't know how instrumental it was for the defeat of the British forces at Yorktown.

One more paragraph from Philbrick's book: "THE BATTLE OF THE CHESAPEAKE has been called the most important naval engagement in the history of the world. Fought outside the entrance of the bay between French admiral Comte de Grasse’s twenty-four ships of the line and a slightly smaller British fleet commanded by Rear Admiral Thomas Graves, the battle inflicted severe enough damage on the Empire’s ships that Graves returned to New York for repairs. By preventing the rescue of seven thousand British and German soldiers under the command of General Cornwallis, de Grasse’s victory on September 5, 1781, made Washington’s subsequent triumph at Yorktown a virtual fait accompli.

Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Hurricane's Eye (The American Revolution Series) (p. xiii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. "

It's a beautiful poem, Carol, and one that makes me very sad right now ... for obvious reasons.

John wrote: "Larry, someone took the first paperback edition and uploaded it to Scribd as a PDF. I don’t think the book ever changed or was updated from the original publication date, so what you have is probably the same book as I am reading on Scribd. ..."

I did find an updated and expanded edition (probably the 2nd edition) on the Internet Open Library. It's about 50 percent longer than that first edition. By the time it gets to the 4th edition, the book has grown to 168 pages. I'd like to have that one, but I'm also reducing the number of books that I buy ... so not now.