It would be free to users/visitors.

I’d probably post 500 poems and 30 short stories.

If anyone has any advice how to do this, it’d be appreciated.

I wonder why I bother (to write another poem)

there are enough (books) already and worthy

Pushkin’s Eugene, Ovid’s 3 Loves

homer’s two towers, Whitman’s sheaves of Grass

MacEwan’s Lawrence, Bukowski’s dogs from Hell

dorfman’s Waltz of death, Catullus’ phallus

Baudelaire’s Spleen, Lao Tzu’s stream

ryokan’s huts, and Li Po’s cups

I wrote that poem on March 11th, 2009. It’s part of a series, called 2 x 4, each with 8 lines (and either 4 stanzas of 2 lines or 2 stanzas of 4 lines).

Those are my favorite poetry books. They don’t represent my favorite individual poems. Blake’s poem would beat most of the poems in those books:

To see a World in a grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

My poem has the following books: Alexander Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin; Ovid’s Amores, The Art Of Love, and The Cures for Love; Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey; Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass; Gwendolyn MacEwan’s The T.E. Lawrence Poems; Charles Bukowski’s Love Is A Dog From Hell; Ariel Dorfman’s Last Waltz In Santiago; Catullus’ Collected Poems; Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen; Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching; Ryokan’s Collected Poems; and Li Po’s Collected Poems.

I know, I know, I should say “my favorite novel of all time.” But, to me, they’re one and the same.

And, I know most people would disagree. Many would say Tolstoy’s War And Peace, even if they haven’t read it, or Anna Karenina if they have. The Nobel Institute says the greatest book of all time is Cervante’s Don Quixote. Perhaps it is a matter of taste, like esthetics, but one can argue that the Sistine Chapel is better than a suburban church -and be right.

100 Years Of Solitude deals with generations of a family, in every decdade of life. It has love, sex, hate, war, murder, beauty, fantasy, companies, religion, art… It has everything another novel has, and more. It’s also funny. It’s also beautifully written. It’s a page turner.

Yes, the names are confusing. Yes, there are some dips. Yes, it might take 30 pages to get hooked (on the first reading).  No art is perfect (since humans made it).

I should say that other books have held this place. The first, when I was 15, was Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer. Later, Hesse’s Siddhartha held the title. Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance had it. War And Peace even held it for a few months. But, on the fourth reading of One Years Of Solitude, it wins.

My bookshelves are full: fiction (novels and short stories); plays; philosophy; poetry; religion; history; and art. The majority is fiction and poetry, and nearly half of that is translated.

My reading’s parameters are wide -I choose from any language, from any culture and region, since writing began.  This makes me grateful for translation, since I can only read in English (so far).  Here are some of the languages I’ve read in English, translated from:

Russian: Tolstoy, Dosteovesky, Chekov, Gogol, Pushkin.

Greek: Homer, Plato and Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles.

Spanish: Cervantes, Marquez, Neruda, Dorfman, Borges.

Latin: Ovid, Catullus, Seneca.

French: Baudelaire, Flaubert, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sartre, Celine, Zola.

German: Hesse, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant.

Japanese: Murakami (Ryu and Haruki); Ryokan, Basho, Kawabata.

Chinese: Li Po, Tu Fu, Xu Yuangji, Lao Tzu, S’eng San, Lieh Tzu.

There are others, of course. Like Rumi, the Bible, the Koran, and so on.

I have The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. The poems are translated by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and David Hinton. Each translator produces varied results from the others. A Li Po poem is translated into 3 different poems, only one of which I like.

Translation is tricky. Murakami’s two translators are great, but only one translator of Marquez appeals to me -Gregory Rabassa for Harper Perennial. Unfortunately, most of Marquez’s books are translated by Edith Grossman (for Random / Knopf / Vintage / Everyman), and she misses the spirit of Marquez.

…After writing that last line, I did some searching and found Rabassa’s book about translating entitled If This Be Treason, in which he writes about translating Marquez’s book and 40 others. Marquez went so far to say that Rabassa’s Enlgish translation of his 100 Years Of Solitude is better than the Spanish original.

If you have read Rabassa’s book, please leave a comment about it. I would like to buy the book.

If you have any interest in translation’s art, please also comment. It’s something I’ve been getting increasingly interested in over the last 5 years or so.

16-Bit Intel 8088 Chip

with an Apple Macintosh

you can’t run Radio Shack programs

in its disc drive.

nor can a Commodore 64

drive read a file

you have created on an

IBM Personal Computer.

both Kaypro and Osborne computers use

the CP/M operating system

but can’t read each other’s

handwriting

for they format (write

on) discs in different

ways.

the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but

can’t use most programs produced for

the IBM Personal Ccomputer

unless certain

bits and bytes are

altered

but the wind still blows over

Savannah

and in the Spring

the turkey buzzard struts and

flounces before his

hens.

Travel
Design Pinnacle – Ryoanji Rock Garden, Kyoto, Japan

I’m a big fan of top-ten lists -be they my own or someone else’s.  I have a top ten list of books, albums, movies, and places I want to visit. My top-ten list for the most beautiful human-made sights that I’ve seen so far, includes: Monet’s waterlilies paintings in his own gallery -L’Orangerie- in Paris, Michelangelo’s David sculpture in Florence, the cliff-descending town of Oia on the Greek isle of Santorini, and the Forbidden City in Beijing. My number 1 spot has stayed rock-solid and uncontested since I first saw it in 2003: the rock garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, Japan.

I loved it so much that I returned to live and work in Japan 2 years later, just to see it again. From Tokyo, I took the bullet train (shinkansen) 2-and-a-half hours south to Kyoto. The return fare is around 150 CND dollars -not cheap. Japan is one of the most expensive countries in the world for travellers, and this is especially good to keep in mind for accommodations and transport (food prices vary greatly).

Kyoto, the home of the imperial family for almost 1000 years, has over 2000 temples and shrines. Allied forces ‘avoided’ the city in WWII bombings, and its 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites remain in pristine condition. One could easily spend a week there enjoying the history, architecture, gardens, religions and arts.  For Ryoanji, I recommend 2 to 4 hours for your visit.

When you pass through the main gate of Ryoanji -in the north-west of Kyoto- you’ll walk along a path towards a beautiful man made pond. 

A little further up the path, you’ll come to the main building. This was a court advisor’s villa in the 1400′s, and the tea room with its painted walls is an added bonus for visitors. The rock garden was designed around 1500 by Soami who created some of the best gardens in Kyoto (and the world).

The rectangular rock garden is the quintessence of Zen art: minimal yet full. It measures 25 meters by 10 meters, and contains  only 15 rocks surrounded by white rock gravel and a little moss.

The first time I visited, I sat for an hour on the long, three-tiered bench for viewing. As usual, it was a full bench. The second time I visited, I spent 3 hours there. Space, texture, colour… all of the elements of great art are in perfection. It works on the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions -and unites them all. At first, I wondered what it meant or represented. Shortly, I realized that was like asking the same question about a river or mountain.

Just as reading music is quite different than hearing it, seeing great art in-person is recommended over reproductions. Having said that, and with the photos above, here is a little video clip to further whet one’s appetite.

There are other renowned and exquisite views to be had at Ryoanji as well: two lovely moss gardens, a famous wash basin behind the main building with the apt inscription “I learn only to be contented”, a sitting room with ikabana (flower art), and of course a gift shop with fantastic books.

A little planning will go a long way. 40 million people visit Kyoto each year, a city of 1.5 million residents. The busiest times are in early April during the the cherry blossom viewing hoards, and in autumn when the trees are changing colour. Ryoanji will be busy at any time of year though, so it’s best to arrive in the morning when crowds are a little thinner. If you’re looking for lunch afterwards, my favorite cafe in Japan is just 200 meters (5 minutes walk) east of the main gate. There’s no sign, but it’s across from the tour-bus parking lot on the south side of the street, below a bar. I’ve been there twice for the great sandwiches, desserts and coffee.

The be-all-and-end-all for all your travel and tourist information in Japan is the JNTO (Japan National Tourist Organization). They set the standard for helpful and organized tourist information, and are easy to find throughout Japan as well. Their site for Ryoanji is JNTO Site for Ryoanji.

Lonely Planet offers a Japan book and a Kyoto book, along with online sites. Their Kyoto site is a nice start. Phaidon and Wallpaper magazine have joined resources to create a new city guide series that is very beautiful and upscale, and usually under 15 bucks CND. This art book publisher offers a Kyoto guide too.

If you’ve been to Ryoanji, and have something to add, please leave a comment below. If you have any information that would help a visitor, that would be great.

I’m also curious about your favorite man-made thing, be it a painting or sculpture or architecture or garden or something else. Nature, with her sunsets and rivers and flowers, is tough to beat so we’ll keep it to man-made things here.

And lastly, if you have made a rock garden, I’d be really interested to hear how that process worked.

newyorker.com

The RRS feed is about a page and a half down the main/homepage, on the right-hand side. It links to an 8-page-length page, with about 20 main sections that allow access by: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, XML, and 7 Podcasts. The left-hand sidebar has 9 blogs. The right sidebar contains: Audio with 4 links; Video with 5 links; and Slide Shows with 4 links. The New Yorker’s Web 2.0 is highly selective, so that the user can choose a focused area of interest that they want updates on (i.e. humor, fiction and poetry, “the talk of the town,” and so on).  The selection is incredible for video, blogs, feeds, audio and podcasts. It would be hard to disappoint a user with this selection. Publishers and editors would be happy that people are following feeds and non-print media (content not present in the hardcopy of the book); since it raises the profile, cache and reputation of the brand. Marketers may not see the immediate correlation to dollar-profits, but brand use and recognition are enhanced. Advertisers may not see the value added though, if their ad is not seen. Advertising revenue seems to be lacking on the online pages so far.

http://www.style.com/vogue

            The top tool-bar has a blog link, which links to 9 stories with slick photos and a right-hand sidebar of quicklinks to fashion designers’, models’, and celebrities’ pages. The main page also has a weekly TV video cast. The RRS feed link is on the bottom-right banner of the main page. One can get it sent to email, mobile, RRS or lookbook. There are 4 feed choices for articles, a video feed choice, and a forum feed choice.

            Fashion is dependant on buzz, being in the know, and “the new.” If Vogue can retain its preeminent position as the best and most respected upper-end fashion magazine by providing up-to-the-second reports, than its publishers and editors would be happy that this audience does not go elsewhere for the same information. Why use two different companies/sources (i.e. Vogue hardcopy and Glamour online) when one will do for both media, and thus retain client loyalty, trust, following and love. Marketers will be glad to get the attention of their audience amidst the abundance of competition in the fashion world. Advertisers will have their clothes shown, as is the done in the print format.

http://www.geist.com

            The RRS feed is on the top-right of the main/home page. Its page is clean and clear, and has a left-hand sidebar which sorts feeds by category.  Geist is a pretty literary, West-coast magazine, and they are happy to get any reader to read their content. It seems like a magazine which is a labour of love, so the publisher and the editor would not fight the online community which supports it. Marketers would hope it is passed on to people (a huge majority of the populace) who have never heard of Geist. Advertisers might like this for the same reason.

Other magazines/sites that I looked at, which don’t have RRS feeds:

The Paris Review, Taddle Creek, Tin House, Artforum, Hommes International Vogue, Interview, Tate Gallery Magazine, Canadian Art

Somewhere froze over.